LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

©lap ©apgngi^tfij 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



PLURI-CELLULAR MAN. 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE INTELLECT, OR " SOUL " 1 

WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 

IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 



FROM 



THK BIOI-.OGJ-IC.AJL. ST.A.NX)I>OIN"T. 




0f 

C. a: STEPHENS, A.M., M. D. 



^^' (OPYBT 



i^?3 xj 



TKE LABORATOEY COMPACsHT, 
Norway Lake, Maine. 

1892. 






Copyright, 1892, 
By C. a. STEPHENS. 



The Library 
OF Congress 

WASHINGTON 



Electrotyped and Printed by 
Altbed Mudge & Son, 24 Franklin St., Boston, 



{ 



CONTENTS, 



I. LIVING MATTER. 

II. THE CELL OF LIFE. 

III. THE SENTIENT CONSTANT OF MATTER. 

IV. PLURICELLULAR MAN ; WHENCE AND WHAT IS 

THE INTELLECT, OR ^*SOUL»? 

V. WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL ? 

VI. IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 



mTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



In a small volume published in 1888, the author set 
forth the Sentient Hypothesis of matter at considerable 
length, from which the following paragraphs may be 
here quoted : — 

" We conceive of matter as sentient, and that its sentience is 
a constant, constantly expended in motion and every form of 
dynamic energy, and as constantly renewed in the cycle of the 
universe. Sentience is the origin and end of all natural phe- 
nomena. Matter moves and returns to itself through the great 
cycle of universal phenomena. Matter possesses the elements 
of feeling; hence the universe has everywhere a low degree of 
sense, — sense to proceed toward an object ; and this sense to 
proceed toward an object •is that which gives semblance of 
design in nature. 

^ * Gravitation and natural phenomena result from the primary 
sentient impulse : a static impulse which constitutes matter 
what we behold it to be. 

'' What seems the inertia of matter is a condition of equilibra- 
tion; what appears to be dead matter is only matter at a dead- 
lock, from which it may be released to live. This living^ that 
is to say, primarily sentient, property is eternal to and insepar- 
able from the ultimate atom, a constant amid the changing 
phenomena of sun and wi)rld systems; and even when locked 
in the apparently dead clod, or stick, or stone, the initial atoms 
are still living atoms, robbed of not one whit of their static 
ability to feel and to live. Such is the present conception. 

'' Philosophy taught much concerning certain supposititious 
properties of matter, and has portrayed its impenetrability, po- 
rosity, extensibility, ductility, inertia, et al. These were held 
to be its prime properties. As a necessity of theological tenets, 
matter was depicted as the lifeless material of a manufactured 
universe. 



6 INTKODUOTORY NOTE. 

''But the philosophy of to-day postulates matter, not as life- 
less but as living; not the inert substance of a created world, but 
the living substance of a self-creating and self-sustaining uni- 
verse; that matter is itself creative of natural phenomena by 
virtue of that static attribute which resides at the core of every 
atom. 

'' Atomicity, however, is a depth of matter of which we yet 
know little; the life of unorganized matter is expressed mainly 
in the effects which we term gravitation and the natural forces. 
Of atoms such as probably radiate from the sun, no apparatus 
yet devised by man enables us to obtain definition in terms of 
weight or size. 

" We know that we stand upon something solid and resistant 
to touch. This is the testimony of sense. Whether the atoms 
be ' physical points,' centres of radiation of energy, is as debat- 
able to-day as in Berkeley's time. Kor is it likely that a solution 
of this problem can be immediately reached, since all our know- 
ledge points to a well-nigh infinite subdivision and rarefaction 
of matter. But, as an incident of the broadening of knowledge 
in this particular, there may be remarked the return of scien- 
tific opinion from the extremes of the dynamic hypothesis 
toward the Newtonian doctrine of matter. To treat of force as 
something distinct from matter is a solecism. 

" That the sentient theory does, in very truth, found on a 
lower basis of fact and discloses a law of phenomena not hitherto 
set forth in any scheme of nature, no one who will observe its 
application to physical and vital problems, thus far obscure, 
can long doubt. It portrays a universe, acting of itself, with- 
out interference. It presents as ' unknowable,' or as yet un- 
known, but one thing — matter. The sentient or vital hypoth- 
esis of the universe assumes, primarily, that matter, the basis 
substance of sensible nature, is creative of the universe by 
virtue of a single primary property — sentience. 

'' The philosophic argument for this hypothesis is the same 
given for every doctrine of either matter or deity, since men 
first reasoned ; namely, its simplicity, consisting in (1) the fact 
that it accounts more fully for all phenomena than any other 
hypothesis ; and (2) that it accounts for such phenomena with 
the assumption of fewest unknown quantities. And herein 
lies all the a priori proof that has ever been advanced for any 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 7 

world hypothesis, or that ever can be advanced in evidence. 
We reason, and can reason on no other basis. 

" The sentient particles /ee?, and from this eternal well-spring 
all phenomena, physical and vital, move forth. Kather there 
are no physical phenomena in the sense of an insentient force. 
All motion originates from the elementary sentience. Hence, 
in organized matter, we contemplate, not the miracle of an in- 
sentient force transforming itself into sentience and intelli- 
gence, but simply the raising-up of this primary sentience of 
matter to more full expression. The organism of any living 
creature is the instrument developed and employed by the 
inherent sentience of its component particles to obtain wider, 
fuller feeling. 

'' The moral effect of this later conception of matter and of 
nature is strong and far-reaching. 

" It means kinship and brotherhood with all nature about us. 
It means love and sympathy, not only for all living things, but 
for earth, air, and sky, for the great sentient environment out 
of which we have emerged, and a part of which we are. Eor 
it is when we are in such sympathy and co-relation with the 
universe around us that we live in fullest measure. Aliena- 
tion is death. We die as we grow callous to the world around 
us, and that is a false creed which instructs to forgetfulness 
of earth and a direction of the heart and mind to a foreign 
state of existence. Such alienation is a hastening on to the 
apathy of old age. We are to be taught to live, not to die. It 
is a most hopeful fact that all the enormous falsehood which 
forms the burden and the shame of literature, namely, that 
earth is a dreary place and life a miserable bourn, has never 
really alienated the great warm heart of humanity from this 
dear old earth, the birthplace and home of all the human 
generations." 

This doctrine of matter (by no means new, since it 
was the doctrine of Gassendi in 1640, of Tyndall in 
1870 ; and in the classic era, of Epikuros, Demokritos 
and Lucretius) was variously and unfavorably criticised 
in 1889, as a " recent form of scientific materialism." It 
is not without gratification, therefore, that after three 



8 INTKODUCTORY NOTE. 

years the author finds his views indorsed and assented 
to by practical investigators like Thomas Edison, Dr. 
Hyslop, Dr. Wm. Thompson and Prof. Sterry Hunt. 
In November, 1891, Mr. Edison says : — 

'^ It is my belief that every atom of matter is intelligent , deriv- 
ing energy from the prnnordial germ. The intelligence of man 
is, I take it, the sum of the intelligences of the atoms of which 
he is composed. Every atom has an intelligent power of selec- 
tion and is always striving to get into harmonious relation with 
other atoms. . . . All matter lives and everything that lives 
possesses intelligence. . . . The atom is conscious if man is 
conscious, is intelligent if man is intelligent, exercises will power 
if man does. 

" We are told by geologists that in the earliest periods no form 
of life could exist on the earth. How do they know that ? A 
crystal is devoid of this vital principle they say, and yet certain 
kinds of atoms invariably arrange themselves in a particular 
way to form a crystal. They did that in geological periods, 
antedating the appearance of any form of life, and have been 
doing it ever since, in precisely the same way. Some crystals 
form in branches like a fern. Why is there not life in the 
growth of a crystal ? Was the vital principle specially created 
at some particular period of the earth's history, or did it exist 
and control every atom of matter when the earth was molten ? 
I cannot avoid the conclusion that all matter is composed of 
intelligent atoms, and that life and mind are merely synonymes 
for the aggregation of atomic intelligence." 

The half-dozen papers, which form the present 
volume, are incidental to an extended investigation of 
the causes of " old age " and organic death, with a 
view to the prolongation of human life; — incidental 
and explanatory rather than strictly pertinent to it. 
The motive in publishing them and others which will 
follow, is a desire to make plain the data and purposes 
of the investigation. At first thought, the effort to 
prolong healthy individual life, by the practical appli- 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 9 

cation of recent discoveries in biological science, would 
seem to require neither vindication nor apology. If 
the life of a normal useful human being can be pro- 
longed to a century, a century and a half, or even in- 
definitely, why not? None the less, many grave social 
and ethical questions are thought to be involved in 
1 such a proposition ; and it appears necessary to clear 
the way, so to speak, for the reception of the prop- 
osition, even among the well-educated. 

I find it also expedient to add, in view of many in- 
quiries made, that the prolongation of life sought from 
this investigation is not expected to come from 
"elixirs," nor any of those picturesque -osophies and 
-ologies which periodically enlist the enthusiasm of 
many susceptible persons ; but rather on those well- 
defined lines of human evolution along which man has 
risen from his anthropoid ancestry, and already pro- 
longed his life-time from fifteen and twenty years to 
seventy-five and a hundred ; the point especially in view 
at present being that these long-operative lines and 
agencies of human progress may be taken under intelli- 
gent control and immensely facilitated by the applica- 
tion of recent science. 



PLURICELLULAR MAN. 



LIVING MATTER. 



AccoRBiNa to as good an estimate as can be made at 
present, — taking into account not alone animals and 
plants, but germs and infusorial orders of life, in the 
water, air and superficies of the soil, — there is in the 
living condition (protoplasm) a quantity of matter 
which would equal a stratum at least one centimeter 
in thickness, over land and sea ; or over an area of 
197,120,000 square miles. 

In other words, there is existent on the earth 177,- 
346,336,000,000 cubic feet of living matter, or proto- 
plasm. By this we mean to convey the idea that such 
a part of the terrestrial globe is constantly in the liv- 
ing condition, similarly as another portion is in the 
aqueous condition, or as still another is in the aerial, or 
the argillaceous, or the carbonaceous condition. It is 
matter quite the same, in fact, identical, in many cases, 
and may readily pass from the living to the non-living 
condition and vice versa. 

This mass of living matter weighs 5,500,460,500,000 
tons : sufficient weight and bulk to make a small planet 
of itself. 

It is ordinary matter, i. 6., oxygen, hydrogen, nitro- 
gen, carbon, sulphur, phosphorus, etc., differing, so 



12 pliTricellulah mak. 

far as the closest examination which we can give it 
shows, in no respect from these same, so-called, " ele- 
ments" in other situations and combinations of non-liv- 
ing matter; nor is there reason for believing, that, 
while in the living condition, it really possesses essen- 
tially diflferent properties, or powers than when in theMi 
non-living condition. It is simply, so far as can be 
learned, that when in the living condition, the arrange^ 
ment of the particles is different; and from this difference 
of arrangement and grouping, a common property, or 
constant^ of matter finds scope for action in a new and 
different manner which we term life. 

Kepler as is known entertained a vagrant opinion 
that the earth is a living creature possessing nous^ also 
lungs ; subject to ailments, a vast amoeba^ swimming 
in the ethereal seas of space. 

The more practical science of this century smiles at 
the foible of the studious old Wirtemburger ; and yet 
it can be asserted in strictest truth that a very consid- 
erable portion of the earth is alive. 

In the broad sense, regarding the earth as we should 
regard it if observing it from some outer point in 
space, the standpoint of one of the earth's companion 
planets, for example, we may represent this living part 
of the earth as a cortex, or stratum, one of its outer 
strata, enclosing it over its entire surface. 

A significant almost startling phase of it is, that this 
vast quantity of matter is constantly passing out of the 
living into the non-living condition. As often as once 
in six hours, probably, once in twelve certainly on an 
average, the entire five or six trillions of tons of 
protoplasmic matter falls out of the living into the 
non-living condition ; and jpari passu an equally vast 



LIVING MATTEil. 13 

weight of non-living matter is raised up into proto- 
plasm. It is believed that all or the most part of the 
matter which makes up the outer strata of the earth to 
the depth of many miles, has at some time or other 
been in the living state, and not once or twice only but 
many times — a million times very likely. 

We may, indeed, go much farther and not exceed 
what is probable in supposing that in the great past 
history of the universe — a history of successive series 
of solar and planetary formations — matter has lived in 
an infinite number of forms and types of life from eter- 
nity, intermittently and alternately. 

The power which facilitates the passage of this enor- 
mous body of matter into the living condition and sus- 
tains it there, consists largely in those dynamic effects 
which come from outer, grander bodies of matter, more 
especially the sun, — stimulus in the form of an ethereal 
influx of matter in extreme tenuity, set in swift move- 
ment by vast mutations of matter afar. 

For here it is significant to note the reversion of 
scientific opinion from the extremes of the dynamic 
hypothesis of ^i^re force toward the Newtonian idea. 
Light and also heat and electricity are not only dynamic, 
but material. Force, so far as we know of it, is always 
associated with an efflux of matter. 

The method by which this continuous passage of non- 
living into living matter is effected, is association and 
contact with previously existing living matter. The 
non-living must be infused into the living matter ere the 
non-living can be re-vitalized. 

The intimate impulse which accomplishes this vast 
transfiguration is subjective^ resident in the protoplasm 
itself, or in other words, in the matter which is, for the 



14 l^LURICELLULAR MAN. 

passing hour, in the living condition, and which sinks 
down from that living condition, while in the act of 
raising up non-living matter to its own level. The 
impulse, or working energy, is apparently a transgres- 
sion of subjective sentience into matter-moving power 
or motion, eflFected at a great depth of atomicity on that 
low plane where particles are able to move in response 
to a primarily sentient property which they universally 
possess. 

It is from this low plane or condition of tenuity, that 
protoplasm is built up, and sets forth in its wonderful 
career, bearing feeling, intelligence, and mind outward 
among inert, coarser masses of matter. For the earth's 
superficies, it must always be borne in mind, is a hard 
theatre for life. On the earth as we find it and now 
inhabit it, life struggles upward from this deep-lying, 
vital plane of matter in the teeth of a gigantic resis- 
tance. The energy in protoplasm is largely expended 
in overcoming this molar resistance ; the bulk of our 
living substance has necessarily been impressed into 
mechanical service, — bone, teeth, hair, cuticle, muscle, 
tendon, in order to make way and obtain food. This, 
in fact, is life on earth, as man has thus far led it; 
but it is possible to improve the earth as a theatre of 
^life, and by the control and regulation of its "natural 
forces " to lessen the resistance. This, indeed, has been 
one of the aspirations and religious dreams of hu- 
manity during all historic time— "Heaven" — and this, 
I suppose, will be the realization of the dream, namely, 
the paradisation of earth. Even during our own gene- 
ration the domination of the electric and magnetic 
forces of matter will be a long step in that direction. 
Man may win his longed-for heaven at last ; and it 
will not be a gift to him, but an achievement. 



LIVING MATTER. 15 

As yet we know no method of transmuting non-liv- 
ing into living matter apart from the agency of pre- 
viously existent living matter. No more can we trans- 
mute carbon into diamond, even when we have existent 
diamonds present ; nor yet can we make feldspar, or 
mica, or gold, or silver, or lead. It is as likely that 
we shall discover a method of producing living mat- 
ter, as that we shall learn to produce any of these 
substances. 

It is quite possible that living matter still continues 
to come into existence on the earth's surface under cer- 
tain circumstances ; probable also that at a former period 
of the earth's history, the conditions, thermal and 
electro-magnetic, may have been much more favorable 
to the passage of matter into the living state than at 
present ; for certain it is, that there have been epochs 
during which a far vaster quantity of matter was con- 
tinuously in the living condition than at present. 

If a telluric catastrophe, attended by the produc- 
tion of great heat or mephitic gases, were to kill, or 
reduce this great stratum of living matter to the non- 
living condition, the earth, at the present climacteric 
of its existence as a life-producing globe, might, here- 
after, lie fallow and lifeless. It seems more probable, 
however, that protoplasm (micro-organisms) would 
again be renewed upon it in lowly form, and that 
another slow cvcle of vital evolution would beo^in, 
although under less favorable conditions than in earlier 
ages. That pluricellular organisms would develop, is 
somewhat doubtful. 

A uniform temperature of 100° Centigrade, continued 
for a few hours, would suffice to terminate the present 
terrestrial life era; yet in the cooling process, amidst 



16 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

the lukewarm masses of lifeless proteid matter, new 
particles might fortuitously be lifted to the living 
condition, and the grand struggle to live again be in- 
augurated. 

It has been argued, on the other hand, that the earth 
could never have produced protoplasm originally ; that 
it is impossible, under any conceivable terrestrial con- 
ditions, that particles of non-living matter should have 
been lifted into the composite, complex arrangement of 
the protoplasmic molecule ; and that the earliest jpro- 
tozoa^ or their spores, must have come to the earth 
in meteoric or cosmic matter, hailing from some world 
in space where other physical conditions prevail, more 
favorable to life ; in a word, that life is not indigenous 
on the earth but immigrant and of alien birth. But 
we are more inclined to believe, with the ancient sages, 
that the earth is truly our common Mother. 

The point made or mooted by the " alien " hypothe- 
ses is, that from the tension of the natural forces in the 
terrestrial mass and the physical resistance to vital action 
protoplasm could never have come into existence spon- 
taneously ; also, that having by chance or intelligent 
design been transplanted into terrestrial matter, the 
struggle to live is one against nature, the nature ofthe- 
environment. In a word, that we are " pilgrims and stran 
gers " on the earth, sighing for another world. This con- 
ception has found utterance in the grim doctrines of 
"Mother Ann " and the Shakers, and in the philosophi- 
cal writings of Schopenhauer et al. 

But there is no good nor sufficient evidence that life 
is alien or unnatural. Rather the reverse. The prob- 
abilities are a hundred to one, that protoplasm origin- 
ated on the earth and that life is native, 



LIVING MATTER. 17 

None the less, there are certain indications that the 
earth has reached, or passed, its life-originating period ; 
that it will never again be parturient of new types and 
genera, although for millions of years it may remain 
a temperate habitat for its children already born and 
grown ; and that some of those grown to adult estate 
may yet acquire well-nigh divine powers and achieve 
that dream of the ages, — immunity from disease and 
death. 

One reason for believing that new protoplasm and 
new protozoa no longer come into existence sponta- 
neously, is that many or all of the micro-organisms which 
we study under the microscope are new only in the 
sense of being newly discovered by us. The disease- 
bacteria were at least operative and produced the same 
ptomaines three thousand years ago. The Diatomacese 
of to-day exhibit the «ame characteristics and the same 
silicious envelope as those taken from fossiliferous strata 
laid down in the seas of the Carboniferous period. In 
fact, many of the genera of micro-organisms are the 
most venerable and changeless of any upon the earth. 
Nor can we wholly agree with those who regard these 
minute creatures as the most rudimentary of living 
forms. It by no means follows that because a living 
creature is small, that it is hence exceedingly simple 
and recent in the sense of ancestry and heredity. 

Another feature of this vast body of terrestrial living 
matter, the most remarkable and important feature in- 
deed, is the singular mode in which it exists or lives, 
from moment to moment. Although of such vast bulk 
and weight when considered in the aggregate, it is 
never found in continuous bulk, but always exists as 
minute modica^ or little measures, isolated one from an- 



18 PLUEIOELLULAR MAN. 

other, scattered throughout and embedded in non-living 
matter. On an average, these minute modica of living 
matter or protoplasm are not much more than the three- 
thousandth of an inch in diameter, but occasionally 
reach the one two-hundredth ; and their true or typical 
form is manifestly spheroidal. From the centre of these 
small spnerules, life is exhibited as a series of attractions 
and repulsions, exerted upon particles of non-living 
matter. In consistency, the living substance is semi- 
fluid ; it is so nearly transparent as to be deemed color- 
less ; and it does not give off odorous particles. As 
above remarked, it is ordinary matter, oxygen, hydro- 
gen, nitrogen, carbon, etc., and the cause of its pecuhar 
behavior, in the living condition, is in all probability the 
manner in which the particles are combined, and their 
arrangement and relations one with another. 

More profoundly, when we seek to know why living 
matter assumes the form of and exists always in the 
small spherical integers, termed "cells," we are brought 
to the investigation of a new law of matter which ap- 
parently acts counter to gravitation, or, as is more 
likely, prevails upon an interior plane of matter within 
that on which gravitation acts. It is the sway and prev- 
alence of gravitation over ordinary matter which 
causes the world of matter, as we see it, to appear 
lifeless and inert. But in protoplasm, pure and un- 
alloyed, we behold a law of matter find expression 
subversive of gravity, prevalent over it and transfigur- 
ing ordinary matter to living matter in spite of gravity, 
so to speak. This may seem a bold statement. Life, 
indeed, has been held by many biologists to be a co- 
relative of gravitation, a cognate and derivative mode 
of the universal energy of matter. Cognate, indeed, it 



LIVING MATTER. 19 

no doubt is ; derivative also in the loose sense of being 
aided and facilitated bv it in all the lareer forms of ter- 
restrial life ; for it is assuredly not the intention here to 
convey the idea that the ordinary functions of animals are 
carried on contrary to gravity, or chemism. The writer 
Ventures, however, to set forth the conception that with- 
in a normal " cell " of living matter there is an expression 
of energy not derived from general gravitation, but su- 
perior to it ; as if emanating from an inner seat of energy, 
as if acting upon matter at a different angle or point 
d ^appui. Such an opinion by no means conflicts with 
the monistic conception of energy. It is meant merely 
to set forth that life is not the immediate derivative of 
gravitation, or chemism, which many physical philoso- 
phers have been inclined to consider it, but rather a 
static property of matter which antedates gravity, and, 
in the intimate composition of matter, outranks it. 

Indeed, the truer view of this great question is 
probably that life finds but an irregular, erratic expres- 
sion in the superficies of the terrestrial globe, where 
gravity and the more gross modes of universal energy 
prevail as a rule. Yet the conception will be found to 
grow in the mind of the student of living matter, that 
this wonderful static property is a very universal prop- 
erty ; in a word, that all matter is sentient at bottom ; 
and that its apparent insentience or lifelessness and 
inertia, as seen on the earth, is less a natural than an 
unnatural and fortuitous condition into which it has 
fallen from the peculiar recoils incident to planetary 
formation. 

This view need not incline the student to entertain 
pantheistic conceptions of matter, or drift away to 
extreme opinions as to a universal mind in nature, — • 



20 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

an ocean of omniscient intellect, from which our 
" souls " are stray driblets. On the contrary, the en- 
tire trend and drift of biological science are to the 
effect that the primary static property of matter is 
sentience only in the sense that the raw flax is dam- 
ask ; that the crude ore is a steel cruiser, and that in 
the great tracts of universal matter, there is nothing 
more intelligent than the possibility of intelligence as 
a result and fruit of a vast cycle of protoplasmic evo- 
lution ; even as in protoplasm of lowly grade there is 
little save the capacity to feel. Be it remembered, too, 
that there is now, probably, no protoplasm existent on 
the earth's surface of such lowly grade, such archaic 
simplicity upon the scale of intelligence, as that which 
first stirred on the early shores of the azoic oceans. 

Indeed, it seems to me that the untaught human 
blunder of deifying the great unintelligent, material 
energy of nature has led to much mischief in all our 
religious concepts. It is better, morally, to regard 
nature as but rudimentarily intelligent, and the human 
intellect as the highest fruit of nature's long effort to 
live and grow in knowledge. 

As the student examines those wonderful little in- 
tegers, the " cells," day by day, the inquiry constantly 
presents itself. Why does the living matter adopt this 
form? Why does it live in these little globules of 
uniform size ? — for although the size of cells differs 
considerably relatively to each other in different tissues 
and situations, the difference is mainly within certain 
definite limits ; and the general type and form are 
unmistakable and apparently unchangeable. 

Why does protoplasm exist in such small measures 
of substance, each scarcely more than a pin's point? 



LIVING MATTER. 21 

Why do its '" cells " fail, since they are constantly grow- 
ing, to attain larger size, an inch or more in diameter? 
Why do they not coalesce in the tissues into one sentient 
working mass? And why, on the contrary, do they 
constantly divide, when these small dimensions are 
reached, and become dormant, die even, rather than 
transgress them ? These are inquiries which the stu- 
dent will find often recurring as he observes cell life. 
The idea conveyed from the totality of such question- 
ings, is one of a certain ever-present barrier to proto- 
plasmic life, or a constantly restricting law. 

As regards the larger pluricellular organisms, how- 
ever, the immediate answer is not far to seek. For all 
these — the metazoans, man, and other mammals, for 
example — are pluricellular creatures in the sense not 
only of being composed of many cells, but also of hav- 
ing a derivative origin from unicellular life. The 
earlier metazoans were banded protozoans, loosely 
confederated groups of unicellular creatures, which for 
a period of their existence remained in a kind of union 
and afterwards disbanded to go their individual, uni- 
cellular ways. 

There is reason to believe that the arrangement of 
matter in protoplasm, as we find it in different animals 
and plants, is very complex. For example, the proto- 
plasm in an oak certainly differs much from that in a 
pine, and that of both much from that in a man : differ- 
ences well exhibited by the diversity of the substances 
which result from their growth . These differences can be 
eradicated in no perceptible degree by any processes of 
nurture which we are able to apply to the protoplasm 
in periods of time which human science has knowledge 
of, and they are believed to have resulted from a slow 



22 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

process of development in accord with certain long- 
standing telluric conditions, through epochs of time 
which must be measured by millions of years. 

It cannot be otherwise than that this tiny dot of 
transparent semi-fluid matter in the cell of the oak sap- 
wood, or of the human brain, small as it looks to be, is 
yet the repository of effects which have accumulated 
and been stored in it through all this vast time period. 
Nor is the concept diflacult to grasp. For were this 
protoplasmic dot magnified till it assumed before our 
eyes the size of a planet, the ultimate atom-particles 
of matter would still remain invisible to human sight. 
There is, therefore, material scope and room, so to 
speak, in the protoplasmic " cell " for differential growth 
and generic evolution for all time. In the dot of pro- 
toplasm, visible only under high microscopic powers, 
are undoubtedly material particles in such numbers 
that no system of arithmetical notation known to us 
could enumerate them. Something of this we know 
from computations of light waves ; ^^ e., we know that 
the " atom " must be not more than a sextillionth of an 
inch in diameter. But how much less may it be? 
This "atom " may be a solar orb down there. 

It is well to practise the mind in such thought, for 
one of the stumbling blocks of our time is lack of faith 
in nature. He who permanently fills his mind with good 
relative ideas of the known immensity and capacity of 
matter, will not find himself barren of hope or delin- 
quent in faith in nature and his race. It helps us to 
get away from that old night-mare of Semitic dogma, 
which for centuries has misrepresented the earth as 
"originally cursed," and humanity as "damned." 

If there is an aspect of nature naore manifest than 



Living matter. 23 

another, it is the aspect of vast, limitless opportunity, 
the sense that everything is possible, possible even to 
frail, pluricellular man, if only he can secure the fac- 
tor, time. 

But the complex intimate structure or material com- 
position of the protoplasmic substance, product as it 
is of long-standing telluric conditions which for ages 
have modified protoplasm in a peculiar manner, becomes 
permanently bent, formed and given over to life and 
growth in a particular mode. Oak and pine proto- 
plasm cannot now probably become anything else ; the 
oak must be an oak for all time to come, and the pine 
a pine, and certain hopeless folk think that man must 
die man. Oak and pine would probably perish sooner 
than reproduce anything else. So of most genera of 
plants and animals on earth, at present. But not all. 
On this rock split the elder Agassiz : he said, all. But 
some genera, or species, have always retained a certain 
primordial mutability and power to go higher, — 
among these, man, or at least some families of men. 
But the ages of development in the " cell," which makes 
that cell grow brain instead of pine, have stored up 
the data of insistent heredity. The innumerable atom- 
particles have grouped and arranged themselves in 
mazy series ; and only altered conditions, acting on 
them through perhaps equal epochs of time, can per- 
manently change them. 

Better than any man of his generation, Agassiz 
recognized the now immutable " permanence of types " 
in many orders of vertebrata, orders which have long 
passed their developmental epoch and sunk into a 
Mongolian impassivity beyond the possibility of a 
renaissance. His exhaustive study of the fishes tended 



24 PLURICELLIJLAR MAN. 

to confirm these opinions, — opinions which were cor- 
rect for the fishes. Thence he reasoned that what is 
unchangeable must have been created, or have come 
upon the earth, as we see it ; in a word, that there have 
been special creations of terrestrial fauna. 

But to-day we recognize not only both the perma- 
nence of types, but that occasional priceless out-crop of 
developmental energy in protoplasm which still leads 
us to hope that evolution is not a " lost art " on the earth. 

Investigation now interests itself with the intimate 
physical co-relatives of this permanence and of this 
developability, seeking to discover how one dot of 
living matter may contain the in-wrought product of 
millions of years of life to the end that it shall grow 
oak, while another dot, indistinguishable from the first 
beneath the strongest microscopic power, contains the 
equally long handiwork of ages to the end that it shall 
grow pine, or brain. Into these diverse dots, the 
biologist would peep as adown two divergent vistas of 
matter, or of the universe, the far ends of which open 
back into the early dawn of terrestrial life. For of 
such protoplasm as first stirred on earth's primitive sea- 
shores there is probably none now to be found. All is 
old and earth-worn, bearing in its bosom the marks of 
its million centuries of struggle and toil, — a grand 
and yet a terrible legacy of heredity for the future. If 
we could learn to read it, we might decipher in this 
soft web of sentient matter the whole past history of 
the globe since the first early, helpless creatures left 
their sinuous trails in primordial slime. And the fu- 
ture Daniels of biological science will yet read the 
hand-writing there. 

Growth is a law of livmg matter ; and on the earth's 



LIVING MATTER. 25 

surface protoplasm is capable under ordinarily favor- 
able circumstances of increasing its bulk much more 
rapidly than it wastes, or dies. 

It is able to conserve energy. A " cell " is capable 
of raising up a greater amount of non-living matter 
into the living condition, than it loses from the living 
condition by the act of so doing. In a word, it 
can grow, or increase its bulk. No "cell" can grow 
without expenditure of energy and a corresponding 
shrinkage of its protoplasm ; but it may incorporate 
particles faster than it loses them, and multiply in 
numbers. 

The only limit to such growth is the capacity of the 
earth as a field for life. It constantly sustains as much 
matter in the living condition as it has room for in the 
as yet imperfect and not fully developed state of its 
vital capacity. The various modes, or genera and 
species of living things, moreover, mutually limit and 
restrict each other. But for animals, plants would 
probably overrun the earth to the full extent of its 
standing room ; but for some species of animals, others 
would increase inordinately. A single pair of rabbits 
in Australia in twenty years would have overrun the 
island-continent. Bacteria, in a barrel of sweet apple- 
juice, propagate at a rate of which no conception can 
be given in figures. Were the visible universe a bar- 
rel of apple-juice, these micro-organisms would fill 
it, twelve millions of them in every cubic centimeter 
of it ; and within a month thereafter — having mean- 
time developed micro-tigers, -wolves, -bears, -lions, 
-sharks, and perhaps micro-men, which had fought, 
torn, devoured and may be worshipped and philos- 
ophized — would all have perished in the sterilized 



26 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

liquid, save perhaps a few grim, acetic " nitrogenists " 
who had discovered the art of " working backwards," 
and hoisting " potential " up from " no potential." 

The point of interest concerning this is that, given 
favorable conditions, with no checks to its growth, the 
tiniest dot of protoplasm might convert all the matter 
of the universe into protoplasm ! or in other words, 
^^ when once a modicum of matter, never so small, has 
entered the living condition, it has the power to draw 
an infinite quantity of contiguous matter into the same 
life-expressing combination, and continue the process 
indefinitely. It is as if the universe of matter were com- 
bustible and the dot of protoplasm, introduced into it, 
were a spark of fire, — with this important difference, 
however, that growth of living matter implies the rais- 
ing up of matter to higher degrees of complexity, or 
the storing up of potential energy in matter, the re- 
verse of igneous combustion. While we cannot affirm 
that growth of protoplasm is creative of energy, it is 
certainly conservative of energy in a manner elsewhere 
and otherwise unknown. 

In protoplasm, a higher or more primary attribute 
of matter, to wit, sentience^ appears to make heat, light, 
and kindred modes of energy its servants and to success- 
fully stem the ordinary katabolic effects of combustion. 
Our present conception of matter is that, while it is 
manifestly not all in the living condition at present, it 
is yet capable from its sentient constant of being univer- 
sally in the living condition, and constituting a literally 
living universe ; this in opposition to the elder hypothe- 
sis that life is a foreign force injected into dead matter 
by a supernatural agent. 

In past ages of the world, noticeably the Carboni- 



LIVING MATTEE. 27 

ferous, a far greater quantity of matter has been in the 
living condition at one and the same time, tlian at 
present ; the indications are that there have been periods 
when the continents sustained twenty times more vege- 
table protoplasm, year by year, than during the present 
era. From age to age the quantity has varied in accord 
with the terrestrial conditions. 

The great cycle of intimate development, of which 
the living substance has been the theatre and store- 
house of subjective effects, has also had the effect to 
limit and restrict the quantity of protoplasm which can 
find foothold on the earth at any given time, in later 
ages. Oak protoplasm is more exclusive and demands 
a better field than kelp or fern protoplasm ; and all 
animal protoplasm is less easily supported and requires 
pabulum of a more refined variety than plant protoplasm. 
Mammals, too, have higher requirements than reptiles 
and the lower orders of animals. In general, the 
development which life on earth has given protoplasm 
may be said to restrict its ability to grow. Honey 
bees will not increase as fast as house flies ; men will 
not multiply as rapidly as rabbits ; the intimate nature 
of pine and human protoplasm requires a wider field 
for growth and taxes the vital resources of the globe 
more exhaustively. 

What is to be the future of living matter on the 
earth ? The question involves several biological prob- 
lems which are already beginning to occupy the attention 
of those who study and think on these topics. 

For example, will a genus of plant or animal proto- 
plasm, as an oak or a horse, when once it has attained 
the acme of its terrestrial development, remain perma- 
nent age after age, as good as ever, so long as the ter- 



28 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

restrial conditions remain unchanged? Does it, from 
some intimate protoplasmic law of its development, 
dependent on extra-mundane causes, tend to rise to a 
certain acme or zenith of developed excellence and 
then decline, regardless of the conditions about it? 
This is a problem which manifestly concerns the inti- 
mate structure of the protoplasm itself. Will the genus 
elephas remain an elephant as long as the earth con- 
tinues in its present condition, or is the genus itself 
describing a cycle of development which rises to its 
zenith of elephantine excellence and as surely returns 
to a nadir ? 

We do not yet know of these things. We have 
learned only that by bettering the conditions, for a 
few years, at least, an apparent improvement may be 
made in certain genera of animals, like the horse, sheep, 
and ox, which reached what has been thought to be 
the acme of their race development in a former epoch. 
Nothing conclusive has here been established ; and in 
regard to those races of animals which once inhabited 
the earth and have become extinct, we have much evi- 
dence that they perished from changed conditions, 
rather than from an "old age" of race. That certain 
genera of animals, both insects and vertebrata, have cul- 
minated from an evolutionary point of view and ceased 
to evince any change for the better, we have abundant 
evidence. It is doubtful whether a single genus or 
species of all earth's numerous experiments in living 
things can be cited as really progressive at present in 
the ordinary organic sense. The human race is no 
longer progressive from the corporeal standpoint. The 
only tissue of the human organism which has not 
already reached type limits is the nervous and cere- 



LIVESTG MATTER. 29 

bral tissue. There is still growth and organic progress 
in brain, corresponding to the growth of intelligence and 
the acquisition of knowledge. A new order of things is 
inaugurated in this direction. The earth having ceased 
to offer new conditions in the way of climate and fresh 
distributions of land and water, developmental progress 
has become restricted to nerve and brain tissue ; and 
we find growing out of this a possibility that man w^ill, 
himself, do what the earth no longer does for him ; to 
wit, change the terrestrial conditions to suit himself and 
become the arbiter of his own future development. 

But these questions concern rather the intimate 
structure of protoplasm and the life of the cell. From 
this our first and outer point of view, the aspect pre- 
sented by the great cortex of living matter on the sur- 
face of the earth is one of constant flux, with both local 
and secular increase and decrease. The picture is of a 
vast volume of matter alternately entering and leaving 
the living condition, obedient to cosmic law. And the 
impression conveyed is, that, given certain conditions, 
any and all the matter in the universe may become 
living matter. 



30 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 



n. 

THE CELL OF LIFE. 

The word " cell" as a name for the little measures of 
protaplasm in which, if we may credit the geological 
records in the rocks, life first began on the earth, is a 
term which has come to us from the older biologists, 
bestowed at a time when the nature of these vital units 
was less perfectly understood than at present. It is now 
of the nature of a misnomer, but is still retained, for 
the reason that no term sufl&ciently definitive has been 
found with which to replace it ; for there needs to be 
set forth in the new term something more than the fact 
of a tiny modicum of protoplasm which absorbs pabu- 
lum and secretes formed matter, — such, for example, 
as'is convej^ed in the ofttimes suggested terms, " plastid " 
and "bioplast." For the thing to be defined is, in 
reality, a living creature, an individual life, a self- 
centring, sentient being. Such a " cell " is to the human 
organism what the citizen is to the nation, and it is 
because the term " cell " conveys some idea of a separate 
life that it possesses a certain vitality in practical use, 
and will persist till better defined. 

" Vital unit " is deemed too mathematical, as is also 
" monads" and corpuscle is otherwise and specially used ; 
6iac? would, I suppose, be considered too classical to 
generally recommend itself, and we shall go on saying 
celU no doubt, till some genius, in a moment of in- 
spiration, attending some grand new discovery touch- 



THE CELL OF LITE. 31 

ing this wonderful matter of life, shall triumphantly 
re-christen it. 

The cell of life was formerly regarded much in the 
light of a modicum of pure protoplasm, which latter 
substance in turn was supposed to be structureless, 
composed of the six so-called elements, — oxygen, 
hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur, phosphorus. 

We now know that a cell may be something v^ry 
complex. It is, in all probability, the seat of a well- 
nigh infinite organization of the sentient, living particles, 
aggregated, in- wrought, and collocated upon a plane of 
growth and development far beneath the reach of the 
microscope at present. Not otherwise could it be the 
theatre of such hereditary effects as we now clearly 
perceive it to be : effects which have been garnered 
there during many millions of years, not one of which 
seems ever to have been really lost, or fails, even after 
centuries of passivity, to be able to reappear. 

The writer is one who sees reason to think that pro- 
toplasm is a substance which, if its constitution could 
be discerned, would be seen to contain a material fabric, 
corresponding to every change and every experience of 
its ancestry since the first fortuitous little dot of living 
matter first stirred and felt the thrill of subjective being 
on the earth. Or even, it may be, that the terrestrial 
living matter hails originally from some other globe in 
space, coming here as a hard little spore across cosmic 
space. Yet even that little spore might contain the 
physically wrought-out record of a whole prior world 
of life, the cycle of which had long ago been described 
and closed in catastrophism. 

For we know that the size of the particles of universal 
matter cannot be greater than the one-sextillionth of an 



32 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

inch in diameter ; that a cell of protoplasm of ordinary 
bulk must contain not less than a million duodecillions 
of such particles. That these " maximum " particles are 
the real atoms of matter is so wholly improbable, 
moreover, that few physicists would deem the hypothesis 
rash or incredible which portrayed them as of planetary 
size compared with the actually atomic -attenuations of 
matter. 

These figures and symbols are but introduced to pic- 
ture, in some faint degree, the possibilities which there 
are in a cell of protoplasm for the storage of hereditary 
effects and the strong probability that it actually is such 
a storehouse ; in a word, that one cell of protoplasm 
produces human brain while another produces oak bark, 
by reason of an ancestral constitution vastly diverse and 
long-derived. When our microscopic powers shall be 
sufficiently perfected for minute determination, these 
cells will be discovered to have within them the ma- 
terial data upon which all these diversities found. 

The contents of the cell of life, however, by no means 
appear wholly structureless under our present powers 
of amplification. The contained protoplasm is often 
seen to be of granular aspect. Visible in most cells, 
too, both in unicellular and pluricellular life, there is a 
nucleus and often a nucleolus. 

Of the many theories, more or less well-supported, 
as to the origin and nature of the nuclear body in cells, 
that appears best evidenced which regards it as origin- 
ally an organ of unicellular life of the character of a 
generative organ, or at least concerned in repro- 
ductive growth ; and that its appearance in the 
tissues of mammals is, in one sense, a survival from 
unicellular life. Yet while the nucleus, as seen in 



THE CELL OF LIFE. 33 

animal tissues, may still be concerned in the intimate 
process of reproduction and necessary to this animal 
function, it should yet be regarded in the light of a 
surviving method, having its origin not so much in the 
economy of pluricellular life as in the hard, early strug- 
gles of unicellular life. At that early epoch, as we 
conjecture, the nucleus was developed as a kind of 
inner repository for that life that suffered constant det- 
riment from the erosive agencies about it ; in order to 
conserve experience and preserve individuality, it was 
necessary to have a modicum of the living matter better 
protected and apart from the tumult of digestive action 
and assimilation. The varieties and curiosities ob- 
served in the nucleus are best explained when it is 
thus regarded, — namely, as a survival organ from the 
unicellular type of life. 

Still further as to the structure of the protoplasm 
within the cell, certain observers claim that they are 
able to discern in it the appearance of a network of 
contractile filaments, and hold that it consists of a deli- 
cate reticulum in a fluid matrix, capable of contraction 
and elongation. 

A reticular arrangement of the living substance is 
certainly not visible in many cells, particularly in uni- 
cellular creatures. On the other hand, there are numer- 
ous protozoans in which a filamentous, contractile, and 
even projectile and prehensile condition of the outer 
protoplasmic layer is as certainly present. In animal 
tissues, particularly adolescent tissue, the component 
cells are often, perhaps constantly, connected together 
by protoplasmic spikules or tendrils, and there is some- 
times an appearance of intracellular filaments, as if the 
connecting filament or tendril from one cell extended 



34 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

quite through a neighbor cell and crossed other similar 
filaments from other cells, entering at different points 
and angles. The present writer has been unable to 
distinguish anything more than this, and has been in- 
clined to regard these tendril-like emanations and com- 
binations as the archetype of a nervous system. 

There is little doubt, however, that the protoplasmic 
tendrils connect the millions of cells in a tissue, or 
organ, in a manner to communicate sensation from 
cell to cell, and that it is for this purpose that they 
reach forth and affiliate. They must hence be an 
important auxiliary to the nerve and brain tissue for 
the derivation of sensation from the cells which are the 
intimate seats of life. What, in the blood-circulatory, 
the capillaries are to the arterioles and veinlets, these 
protoplasmic threads and filaments, connecting cell to 
cell, are to the small nerves. And even as the capilla- 
ries are the most essential parts of the vascular systemj 
so this intercellular network of living matter may be 
quite as essential to the nervous system ; since it unites 
the otherwise insulated unicellular units of the organism 
in one mutually sentient body. And in the case of the 
nervous and brain tissue, this protoplasmic sentient bond 
between the component cells of the " gray matter " mani- 
festly underlies individuality, and renders personality 
possible in the continent mass of the encephalon. 

The cell of life presents various other appearances 
and phases. It often contains non-living substances 
which are plainly out of place there, also bubbles, vac- 
uoles, and tiny lacunes of water. 

The impression will be found to grow that cells, as 
they occur, are far from typically perfect, and often 
exhibit abnormalities. It is to the intimate molecular 



THE CELL OF LIFE. 35 

structure, or composition of the living substance itself, 
that we shall have to look for the explanation of vital 
phenomena, rather than to these grosser forms and 
movements which protoplasm assumes and evinces in 
the cell, as we at present view it. For nucleus, granules, 
and contractile threads are but the grosser mechanical 
manifestations of an arrangement of sentient particles on 
a more esoteric plane of matter. There may even be 
sentient combinations within these combinations, nay 
others more intimate still, ere we reach that vivific 
plane where a sentient particle, or atom, is able to 
move in response to its own subjective sentience and 
conscious desire, and thus inaugurate motion in the 
universe. None the less, we must ultimately reach that 
plane — the vital plane — where matter, any matter, 
matter universally, begins to move from the impulse of 
a subjective sentience. 

It is not designed here, to open in extenso the much- 
debated question whether matter feels before it moves 
and moves as a result of feeling ; or vice versa^ whether 
matter is first moved extraneously, and being moved 
begins to live. Nor is feeling, in the physiological 
sense, what is here meant. 

Ultimately there can be but one conclusion reached, 
namely, that matter moves from its subjective side ; 
and that the interesting process which we term living, 
results from first, subjectivity, then motion. This initial 
sentience of matter has existed from the beginning of 
things, and when matter finds itself in the peculiar, 
mobile combination of protoplasm, it is able to begin 
there to overcome the terrestrial resistance to motion. 

The question, whenever and however raised, always 
brings the investigator around to the same point and 



36 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

discloses the same necessity for a purely, personal de- 
cision on his part, — which of two opposed conceptions 
of cosmos he will choose as his own. He must answer 
for himself according to his light. 

Is matter radically inert and dead, forced to move 
by a power foreign and primarily separate from it ? 
Or is matter fundamentally sentient and alive, and the 
universe self-actuating ? 

There is not much that can help the questioner here, 
save the widest possible knowledge of nature. 

If the universe is self-actuating, then matter moves 
from an inner sentient impulse. 

If it is a dead, inert mass, actuated by a power, apart 
and separate from it, then the matter in protoplasm is 
first moved and exhibits life afterwards. The latter is 
the present theological doctrine, so far as that doctrine 
may be said to comprehend the question. 

Is the universe of matter a living self-actuating uni- 
verse? Or is it a dead and inert one, driven amain 
through space and time by a power not in it, nor of it, 
but launched upon it from some unknown point outside it ? 

We have no ambition to be polemic, and merely re- 
mark that this is the Mont St. Jean of theology and 
science. 

Given now our cell, with its nucleus, its granules and 
vacuoles, let us go on to observe what actually takes 
place within it, as it lives and manifests that peculiar 
and nowhere else observed faculty of self-movement, 
which immediately rivets our attention as neither me- 
chanical nor chemical, but vital ; and which at once 
strikes the kindred chord within us, the sense of kin- 
ship and of sympathy, as something not lifeless, but 
living, like ourselves, with sensibility, wants, hopes, 



THE CELL OF LIFE. 37 

fears, and an ever expressed desire for happiness as a 
result of its struggle for existence : that sense of veri- 
similitude with ourselves which renders it impossible 
to look down the tube of a microscope and watch even 
the tiniest bacterium, as he starts to run, or swim, 
pauses, hesitates, gets frightened, changes his mind and 
starts off on a different course, without the sudden strong 
conviction that here is a small brother of us all, who is 
having a hard time of it and who wins our pity when he 
comes to grief, or gets mauled or swallowed by some 
bigger fellow ; and our sympathy or admiration when 
he adroitly escapes his enemy and secures a choice 
mouthful for himself out of the great universal fund of 
pabulum for which we are all, as well as he, struggling 
to get our share. 

There is now good reason for asserting that the 
nucleus is that central, most intensely vivific portion of 
the cell contents, whicli presides overnutrition, growth, 
and hence reproduction — which is a mode of growth. 
A stream of food particles entering the cell through the 
cell wall, or envelope of the living mass, will flow 
through the outer portion of protoplasm, and seems not 
to be wholly transformed into protoplasm, till it has 
entered, or at least come in contact with the nucleus. 
But once having come into full contact with the nucleus, 
the process of transformation from the condition of 
food to living protoplasm appears to have become a 
fact; and the current of particles, now no longer food, 
but protoplasm, turns and moves outwardly, toward the 
periphery of the cell, sometimes seeming to bear along 
with it the older protoplasm, sometimes appearing to 
flow in a distinct current. Approaching the periphery, 
it apparently becomes de-vitalized, as if the individual 



38 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

life of the cell could Dot exist save within the circum- 
ference of a certain radius from the centre, and relapses 
from the living condition to the proteid condition as a 
cell product. 

It is in this circuit of the stream of food particles, 
inward to the centre of the cell and outward to its cir- 
cumference, to form cell products, that the mystery of 
life is involved. 

What does this transmutation of lifeless pabulum to 
living protoplasm signify ? What is it that has been 
done? Proteid molecules, such as all protoplasm con- 
sists of when killed, have returned to life. There has 
been a resurrection, — a rising from the dead. 

Living protoplasm is a more complex compound, and 
more continent of energy than lifeless, proteid matter ; 
more units of potential work are contained in it. The 
food particles, during their passage to the centre of the 
nucleus, have, by some power resident in protoplasm, 
been raised and re-grouped upon a higher level of com- 
plexity. In their passage back to the periphery, and 
their fall to the lifeless condition of cell products, or 
proteid matter, power is generated. The whole amount 
of bodily power is thus derived, in fact. It results 
from the process of devitalization, and is to all appear- 
ance accomplished by the agency of oxygen imported 
by the red corpuscles of the blood from the external 
air. 

But the longer we examine it the more evident it 
becomes that this latter derivation of power by oxygen- 
ation, during the de-vitalization of living protoplasm, 
must be regarded as the reverse step only, — the fall 
of the weight raised up by vitalization. In a word, 
that, instead of one, two distinct series of phenomena 



THE CELL OF LIFE. 39 

take place simultaneously in every living cell, namely, 
a flowing inward and up^vard to the nucleus of a 
current of proteid matter, which is vivified and charged 
with energy by so doing, from contact with the 
resident living matter of the cell, and a flowing 
outward and downward of a stream of living proto- 
plasm, which loses life and thereby gives out power. 
The latter process is manifestly chemism, and is accom- 
plished by the action of energies which we know as 
chemical. This chemism, indeed, is what many — in 
fact, the most — physiologists have mistaken for the 
whole function of the cell. In reality it is the least 
important function. The really important function of 
the living cell is the raising up of the weight, or the 
generation of power by the act of vitalization. 

The power to do this, we say, resides in the original 
living matter of the cell, which is obtained by inheri- 
tance from earliest and lowliest ancestry. It is quite 
conceivable, indeed, that, given one primordial cell, 
originating from the chance collocation of carbon, 
oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen particles, during the 
early terrestrial tumult, the entire surface of the earth 
may have become covered with living forms ; that every 
species of plant and animal may have arisen from it. 

The protoplasm of plants and vegetation generally, 
which is not compelled to accomplish locomotion, pos- 
sesses the ability to raise vast quantities of low-grade 
matter, to wit, carbon dioxide, water, and ammonia, 
directly upward into starch, fat oil, and vegetable albu- 
men. Far greater power in this respect resides in vege- 
table than in animal protoplasm. Given HgO, N H3, and 
C O2 in infinite quantity, with a modicum of living 
vegetable protoplasm through which it may continuously 



40 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

pass, and if time be given for the process, there is prac- 
tically no limit to the quantity of starch, sugar, fat, 
gluten, and cellulose which may be produced. Given 
a suflScient time period, indeed, it is conceivable that a 
single cell of protoplasm might have raised up the en- 
tire quantity of starch, sugar, fat, and gluten at present 
existing on the earth. Nor is there any reason to think 
that such a cell might not, under favorable conditions, 
go on thus storing up power through infinite time. 

Hence, it is manifest that behind this cell of proto- 
plasm, displaying such exhaustless capacity for work, 
there must be a commensurate power supply. For no 
one supposes the cell to be more than a self-sustain- 
ing, self-repairing instrument or collocation of matter, 
through which the energy of the material particles acts. 
What then is the nature of the power behind it or from 
what source does it emanate? 

To the writer there appears to be but one answer. 

It emanates outward from the inner penetralia of 
matter, from an inner plane of material combination. 
Protoplasm acts as a vehicle, or a medium of conduc- 
tion, so to speak, for the liberation of this power out- 
ward into the grosser plane of chemism as kinetic 
1 energy. This inner shrine, or intimate plane of matter, 
we may term the vital plane. Here the sentient 
particles are self-motive. Here the initial sentience — 
which is the mainspring of the universe — is able to 
express itself in terms of motion ; the particles feel and 
move. This initial sentience of the ultimate particles 
of universal matter may be regarded as a static prop- 
erty, an archaic attribute, a constant in nature, — in 
the sense at least that it is here renewed constantly in 
the grand cycle of universal phenomena. 



THE CELL OF LIFE. 41 

From this sentient plane the "natural forces" of 
matter emerge, and to this plane they return. 

The little measure of protoplasm contained in a 
cell oflfers an outlet to the intimate sentient energy 
of matter universally. Protoplasm touches down to the 
sentient plane. In protoplasm, the static sentient 
property can stir contiguous particles, draw them within 
the bond of sentient relationship and collocate them one 
with another, so that they, too, can stir and move other 
particles. In living, the modicum or cell of protoplasm 
first grows to the terrestrial cell size, and then, w^hen 
this limit is reached, either deposits "formed matter" 
(dead protoplasm) around the boundary of the cell, or 
else divides to form new cells. But the point here to 
be kept in view is, that an exhaustless source of power 
from the sentient side of matter finds an outlet into 
ordinary terrestrial matter through the medium of 
the protoplasmic cell. That such a vital plane of 
matter, where the sentient jparticles are self-motive^ 
really exists and that upon it founds the great doc- 
trine of Free Will in man, is the position here adopted, 
and one which will be given a more full demonstration 
in future. 

The purpose in the present paper, however, is to set 
forth the fact of the intimate seat of personality in the 
cell ; or in other words, to point out that the cell is not 
only a modicum of protoplasm, but the instrumentality 
of a self an ego, a personal being. In a cell a cer- 
tain number of millions or sextillions of material par- 
ticles, each one of which is a sentient particle and m 
lowly degree, a self-sentient particle, are so collocated 
that they blend their sentience in one and form an indi- 
vidual life ; even as in pluricellular organisms, millions 



42 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

of these individual cells merge their personal lives in 
the life and intellect of an animal or a man. The cell 
is a bond of sentient particles. Moreover, so far from 
being simple homogeneous dots of living matter, most 
cells, either of unicellular or pluricellular life, are of the 
nature of very complex organisms, the repositories of a 
vast ancestral experience. 



THE SENTIENT CONSTANT OF MATTER. 43 



m. 

THE SENTIENT CONSTANT OF MATTER. 

We are able to gain mathematical knowledge of par- 
ticles of matter so minute that ten quadrillions of them 
would not weigh the thousandth part of a grain, nor 
when aggregated be visible to the eye. 

We know that particles exist so small that a stream 
of them may fly off constantly from a mass for a quarter 
of a century without diminishing the weight of the mass 
by so much as the hundredth part of a grain ; yet from 
their physical behavior we know that each one of these 
vagrant particles possesses weight, chemical properties, 
and the power to produce sentient effects. In a word, 
throughout the length and breadth of cosmos, there has 
never been discovered a particle of the universal sub- 
stance of things so small that it does not possess these 
properties and powers. Such an undowered particle, 
indeed, would be something more than an anomaly. It 
would be a nonentity. We could not know it as mat- 
ter ; for we have no knowledge of matter with which 
there is not included a contingent of energy. Inert 
matter does not exist, so far as known ; and it is plain, 
too, that no knowledge of it could ever be obtained by 
science, or by human sense, if it did exist. Hence it is 
out of the question and out of the province even of 
"revelation." 

The scholastic conception of inert matter and " or- 
iginal world-atoms " upon which a " world energy " 



44 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

operates is a very crude one, derived from the merely 
visual inertia or stability of terrestrial matter in the 
gross. Such "inertia" of matter is perceived only by 
virtue of latent properties which transcend the very 
conception of inertia. If wholly inert, matter would be 
invisible, imperceptible to touch or feeling, and outside 
of any possibility of becoming known to us. Hence to 
speak of inert matter, or inert atoms, is to stultify 
one's self. 

In the same category fall all those abortive definitions 
which have been attempted of energy or force. No 
one can define energy in terms which do not include 
matter. Vice versa, matter can not be defined in terms 
exclusive of energy ; and this for the best of reasons, 
namely, that the human intellect can obtain no concep- 
tion of inert matter, or " pure " energy. The similes 
on which all such definitions have been projected were 
conceived by aid of the very constants which the defini- 
tions attempted to exclude! 

Hence we set down as one of the premises of this in- 
quiry, that matter and energy are indissoluble, or what 
comes to the same, that we have not and never can have 
knowledge of one separate from the other. And here 
it may be added, incidentally, that this later doctrine of 
matter and energy as components, outranks both the 
accusation of materialism on one hnnd and of spiritism 
on the other. 

If this conception be as true and as unassailable as 
we conceive it to be, every particle of the unnumbered 
millions of particles which enter a cell of living matter 
as pabulum, and are assimilated and, for the time being, 
take their places in it as protoplasm, brings with it its 
inseparable quota of energy; and, moreover, while in 



THE SENTIENT CONSTANT OF MATTER. 45 

the living condition, this energy is exhibited as sub- 
jective sentience. But departing out of the cell, as 
formed matter or waste, it carries its native and insep- 
arable measure of energy with it. Sentient in human 
protoplasm, it may ere long appear again, perhaps, in 
plant protoplasm, or bacteria, or never again, or not 
for a thousand or a million years. For it may exist 
in earth, water, or air, or fire-dust, till solar systems 
change form and grow again ; yet, whenever it shall 
enter protoplasm, it would still exhibit life. 

As to the nature of this orginai modicum, of energy 
which the particles of matter possess, no one can give 
it name or say what it is in terms that adequately de- 
scribe it. Scientists define it as vis viva, energy, 
dynamic property, power, force — according to the 
way in which it is conditioned and manifested. All the 
elder school of scientific writers discriminated between 
physical and vital energy. It was not easy then 
to see that the impulse which exhibited itself as 
gravitation could possibly be the same as that which 
stirred in protoplasm as life. In the same manner the 
philosopher of an earlier date could not conceive of 
heat as a mode of motion, but pictured it as "caloric," 
' — something sui generis. 

Only gradually has this philosophical and scientific 
polytheism been monotheized^ so to speak, and the 
unity of the universal energy been accepted as the true 
faith. 

With wider light and from the broader view, biology 
can now confidently teach that the property which the 
particles of universal matter exhibit as sentience in 
protoplasm is the same which, in combustion, is dis- 
played as heat and light, or in electrolysis as electric 



46 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

tension, or in falling bodies as gravitation, or in the 
rifle shot as momentum, or in the sun's vast molar 
mutations as all of these together. We no longer fear 
that we shall lose dignity, or become materialistic, if 
we rank our intellects with heat and light. Heat and 
light may be as " divine " as we ! Potential divinity, 
indeed, is on all sides of us. The meanest clod con- 
tains it. One particle is as divine as another. All are 
peers. It is merely a question of how long and how 
carefully the particles — each with its eternal inheri- 
tance of divinity — have had opportunity to arrange 
themselves in relation one with another in the cell of 
living matter. A cell of the human brain is a highly- 
wrought and intimately constituted congeries of particles 
which have been getting into their present condition of 
excellent sentient relationship during a hundred millions 
of years. We conceive of such a cell as containing 
what, mathematically, would appear an innumerable 
number of particles, brought rank on rank, series on 
series, and system on system, and in such delicate poise 
and balance, one to another, that every one of these 
millions of particles stands sentiently related to all, 
and that, from this fine mutual reciprocity, sense which 
has been elevated to intellect arises. 

But any particle of matter is capable and qualified to 
enter such a cell, live in it as a peer of all the rest for 
a time, and, departing thence, enter other combinations 
and exhibit the energy which it recently displayed in 
intelligence, as light, or heat, or other motion. 

There is, indeed, a constant inrush of particles into 
such a cell, and a corresponding exodus as formed 
matter and waste. But the excellence of the inherited 
mutual relationship of particle to particle is preserved. 



THE SENTIENT CONSTANT OF MATTER. 47 

or deteriorates but slowly and secularly ; hence the cell 
preserves its individuality, although its component 
particles are constantly shifting, entering and escaping 
in streams on all sides. Such a picture every cell of 
living matter presents so long as it lives, and it is from 
a long observation of these phenomena that the present 
doctrine of life is conceived ; namely, that any particle 
of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and sulphur, in 
cosmos, will do equally as well as another for the exhibi- 
tion of life ; that these particles may alternately enter and 
leave a cell of protoplasm a hundred times, yet always 
display the same measure of energy when drawn into the 
sentient brotherhood, and that this capacity to live is 
from a property inherent in them, which they can be 
deprived of by no known means, and which no applica- 
tion of external force can either slacken or intensify. 

This quotum of energy is what we mean by the 
sentient constant of matter. 

The terms " sentient constant," " sentient property," 
and "inherent sentience of universal matter," as employed 
in these papers, signifying the initial energy of the inti- 
mate particles of matter, is not free from objection, nor 
yet in accord with the secondary use of the words, sen- 
tient and sentience. None the less, it is the best word 
term, taking into consideration exactly what needs to 
be expressed, in view of the present biological aspects 
of matter, that has thus far suggested itself. 

The term " living matter " has been used to designate a 
portion of ordinary matter the particles of which, for 
the time, chance to be in such a condition of mutual 
relationship that their native sentience is able to give 
rise to subjective phenomena. 

According to this conception of matter, the sentient 



48 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

coDstant of the material particles is their primary and 
inseparate component, that factor, property, or ingredi- 
ent, which constitutes them matter as we know it. 
Hence, we allude to the sentience of matter as a con- 
stant, meaning the ability^ potency, or capacity of mat- 
ter'to live. We further conceive of this sentient constant 
as the original world impulse, by virtue of which motion 
is evinced and all phenomena are exhibited. The con- 
ception is, that intrinsically and fundamentally the uni- 
verse is a living universe, not a lifeless mass driven 
forward by an external, extrinsic agent. As to the 
origin of the sentient constant of matter, or what it is 
ultimately, nothing is attempted in the line of explana- 
tion or definition. It is seen to be a component prop- 
erty of the most minute particle of universal mutter 
and seen to possess the elements of sentience. With 
the words " elemental sentience " our conception of it 
stops and can advance no farther. 

It is not to be inferred, however, that this definition 
represents minute particles of matter as intelligent or 
personal, in the sense that living creatures are so. 
Animals are long-matured resultants of protoplasmic 
life. They vary in intelligence according to the excel- 
lence of their organisms. An amoeba can scarcely be 
said to approximate a dog or a man in intelligence. 
Similarly, the sentient difference between an amoeba 
and a particle of unorganized matter, is no doubt far 
wider than that between an amoeba and a man. 

We do not conceive that this sentient property is 
other than the property exhibited in the gravitation of 
matter, or in chemical action, or in any of the so-called 
natural forces. We see no reason to think that all 
phenomena are not from one and the same source of 



THE SENTIENT CONSTANT OF MATTER. 49 

energy. In other words, gravity and the kinetic modes 
of energy in cosmos originate in a sentient impulse in 
matter. 

It is likely and probable that all chemism is attended 
by a low degree of sentience. Not the pain or pleas- 
ure of the organized developments of living matter, 
since these include personality, but a certain low grade 
of sensation. The universe seems, indeed, to hQ feeling 
its way forward in time and space according to certain 
very lowly and rudimentary, yet enormously massive, 
perceptions of what is right and wrong, true and 
false, good and bad. And while there is nothing in 
the totality of its phenomena, as we observe them, 
which leads us to infer that it possesses a high order of 
intelligence, it yet inspires us with a certain degree of 
confidence that these humble, but immensely volumi- 
nous perceptions, purblind and impersonal as they ap- 
pear, will not in the end and on the whole go wrong. 
Such, I think, is the impression which the universe 
gives to all who make wide and dispassionate observa- 
tion ; namely, that its vast energies make, or tend to 
make, for good, and are voluminous and strong enough, 
in the end, to prevail over accidental evil. There may 
be, probably are, globes of matter in space where this 
orbic benevolence is more perfectly displayed than on 
the earth. There are astronomic reasons why the earth 
can hardly be regarded as a comparatively well-favored 
globe, considered as a habitat for personalized forms of 
living matter. Life here — animal life — struggles 
against an enormous physical resistance. To live on 
the surface of our earth at present implies a grim death- 
grapple with adverse conditions. Protoplasm, indeed, 
wastes or dies in its effort to grow or live, with a rapid- 



50 PLUEICELLULAR MAN. 

ity and distress which are appalling to contemplate. 
Owing to the hard terrestrial conditions we have be- 
come organized to live only as we die, or are disinte- 
grated. It is by no means an ideal theatre of life ; 
and there is a great deal of prayer and despair along 
the line of our developmental struggle. What looks 
to be best and most beautiful, is most frequently 
i crushed out ruthlessly. Not ruthlessly, if that word be 
used as a reproach for cruelty. Nature protects as 
far as it knows and perceives. There is no wanton 
cruelty. There is no immoral neglect from nature. It 
is only that the great, lowly-sentient mass on which we 
live and the vaster globes about which it ponderously 
wheels, are but little conscious of our personal for- 
tunes. So far as they feel and know they smile and 
protect. But we must not expect too much. 

It would seem rather wonderful and anomalous if, 
somewhere in space, on globes better conditioned to 
sustain life, organisms, animals, beings superhuman, 
had not arisen from living matter to a height of intelli- 
gence surpassing man. Analogy would lead us to 
fancy that such are able to watch the earth from afar and, 
in the perfection of their visual or telescopic powers, 
mark us at our toil. Such beings might, we can imagine, 
at least be able to assist us, or "reveal" some truth 
that would aid us. But on the whole, there is not the 
slightest evidence that any aid of this sort has ever 
come to the earth out of space. 

The ordinary conception of matter is a wholly super- 
ficial and erroneous one. Matter is conceived of as 
" dirt," as " earthy," as contemptible. This idea comes 
from ignorance of what matter is. When the biologist 
asserts that life is an organized derivative from a pri- 



THE 8ENTIENT CONSTANT OF MATTER. 51 

mary property of universal matter, theologian and sectary 
are at once shocked at what seems to them a blasphemy ; 
namely, that life has arisen from dirt ! It is plain that 
this revulsion of their sensibilities springs from a low 
estimate of matter. There is no such thing in cosmos 
as "dirt," in this sense. Yet the odium in the accusa- 
tion, "materialist" and "atheist," all founds in this 
erroneous popular idea. To the mind of a well-in- 
structed biologist, on the contrary, matter is a sublime 
mystery. 

Whence it came or whitherward it moves, none can 
answer. It is the unknown. We feel, see, and study 
certain of its phases, but of its origin, or destiny, we 
know nothing as yet. 

Not from lifeless atoms then, not from "dirt" are 
our intellects arisen, but from a sentient substance which 
fills all space and endures through all time, indestructi- 
ble, immortal, the type and symbol of omnipotence. 
What grander origin could humanity claim for itself! 

Even our present scanty knowledge of matter enables 
us to perceive that such are its attributes ; and ever as 
the horizon of our science broadens and the clouds of our 
ignorance lift, we are led to regard matter with new 
awe and greater reverence. Fresh from the mutations 
and destructive catastrophes of a thousand world-deaths, 
it emerges ever new with the same onimpotent power 
to create afresh. Yesterday, to-day, forever, it is the 
same exhaustless well-springof motion, beauty, feeling, 
and life. 

Life arises from the sentient constant of matter ; the 
protoplasmic cell is a more or less permanent aggrega- 
tion of particles whose sentient endowment is static 



52 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

and eternal; the problem of prolonged life, both in 
unicellular and pluricellular creatures, lies in pre- 
serving the cell from destruction, injury, and undue 
waste. Greatly prolonged life, immortal life even, is 
possible, potential. Immortality, indeed, is clearly 
foreshadowed in the sentient constant of the material 
particles of which the earth, the universe, is composed. 
These ever-sentient, never-dying particles furnish the 
basis for it. 

It becomes, therefore, a question of preserving the 
cell, the self, from harm, from preponderant waste, from 
accidents, and from the ravages of hostile forms of life : — 
all essentially vulgar causes of death, none of which 
touch, or ever can touch, the sentient well-spring of life 
in atomic matter ; and all directly amenable to human 
effort to ameliorate and remove. 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 53 



IV. 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE INTELLECT OR 

"SOUL'^? 

Histologically speaking, the human body is a con- 
federation of thirty or more genera and species of minute 
living creatures, commonly termed "cells," whose an- 
cestry was the unicellular life of the ancient earth. 

The cell of life may now in strictest truth be defined 
as a microscopic creature, composed of living matter, 
or protoplasm, protected by the non-living products of 
the same ; nor can it be regarded otherwise than as an 
individual being, possessed of a personal sense and, 
even in highly developed pluricellular organisms, of a 
considerable degree of autonomy. 

It is well to remember that the great bulk of terres- 
trial life is still unicellular, and that pluricellular ani- 
mals are to be regarded as a later and by no means yet 
complete development from unicellular life. If the 
reader has access to large well-illustrated text-books, or 
atlases of zoology, it will be worth the while to spend 
an hour, at this point, reviewing the numerous varie- 
ties, species and orders of this wonderful unicellular 
life of the globe. Even the condensed articles on this 
subject in the " Encyclopedia Britannica" will convey 
an idea and give some conception of it. 

Passing forward from unicellular life, an atlas of 
Histology, with numerous illustrations of the various 
orders of cells in animal tissues, will prove suggestive. 



54 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

In particular should be noted the layer of large multi- 
polar cells of the cortex of the brain, — how the proto- 
plasmic processes or living filaments from these, rising 
upward to form the gray matter of the brain, blend, 
inter-twine, and sentiently communicate one with another 
in a manner at once wonderful and significant. It is 
here that the personality of a million different cells is 
united into one intellect or "soul." 

If an attempt be made to extend the above definition 
of a "cell," the limits of our present knowledge are soon 
touched. 

The protoplasm, of which the cell is composed, is a 
transient, easily desintegrated compound of ordinary 
matter, which material particles are constantly entering, 
and from which they as constantly emerge ; that is to 
say, it is not these ordinary oxygen, carbon, and nitro- 
gen particles which make protoplasm, so much as the 
manner in which they are grouped together ; since 
these same particles may be otherwise associated to- 
gether and no visible token of life result ; and by visible 
life, we mean life attended by movement and protoplas- 
mic growth. It is apparently a question of collocation, 
or relative position of particle to particle, allowing of a 
peculiar interaction and a unique expression of the pri- 
mary powers of the particles. 

The true terrestrial type of life was and still is uni- 
cellular ; creatures consisting of a single protoplasmic 
cell from which are displayed all the functions, in 
miniature, exhibited by pluricellular creatures. These 
are the protozoans, the first, the standard type ; nor is 
this type essentially changed in the metazoans, or pluri- 
cellular organisms, since the latter are merely well-con- 
federated associations of unicellular creatures. There 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 55 

is indeed but one type of life on the surface of our 
globe, the unicellular, and this type is preserved in all 
forms of life. 

Pluricellular organisms are a later development from 
unicellular life. At first the metazoans were small, 
simple aggregations of the protozoans ; and the fact of 
confederation appears not even to have modified the 
separate unicellular lives. Each retained complete au- 
tonomy, performing all the functions of a separate life. 
Change of the conditions of habitat led to more per- 
manent grouping and induced modification anddifi*eren- 
tiation of functions, till at length dissolution of the 
bond which united the several unicellular lives became 
impossible ; and thus the way for further diflerentiation 
of functions and the evolution of compacted and organ- 
ized metazoans was opened. 

All the pluricellular organisms of which the human 
body is an eminent example, are but extensive, organ- 
ized unions of unicellular life in which the type of uni- 
cellular life still distinctly persists. 

It is not the purpose here to introduce illustrations, 
seriatim^ of such metazoans. Survivals of very early 
groups are even now to be found. But as new condi- 
tions of existence occurred, from geological mutations, 
the primitive simplicity of the early confederations of 
unicellular life was modified ; they took on a greater 
degree of permanence and grew to larger proportions ; 
and the better to accomplish locomotion, respiration, 
prehension, and digestion, a division of labor became 
necessary ; the original diverse functions of the com- 
ponent unicellular creatures, thus banded together, 
were restricted, or extended ; and, as a result of a long 
process of such differentiation, the organisms of the 



56 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

larger animals and of man came to be composed, as we 
find them, of thirty or more different species of cells. 
For example, we have the muscle cells whose vital 
energies are devoted to the office of contraction, or 
vigorous shortenings of length ; connective tissue cells 
whose office is mainly to produce and conserve a tough 
fibre for binding together and covering in the organ- 
ism ; bone cells whose life work it is to select and 
collocate salts of lime for the organic frame-work, 
levers and joints ; hair, nail, horn, and feather cells 
which work in silicates for the protection, defence and 
ornamentation of the organism ; gland cells whose 
motif in living has come to be the abstraction from the 
blood of substances which are recombined to produce 
"juices," needed to aid the various processes or steps 
of digestion ; blood cells which have assumed the labo- 
rious function of general carriers, scavengers, and 
repairers of the organism ; eye, ear, nasal and palate 
cells which have become the special artificers of com- 
plicated apparatuses for transmitting light, sound, 
odors and flavors to the highly sentient brain cells ; 
pulmonary cells which elaborate a tissue for the intro- 
duction of oxygen and the elimination of carbon dioxide 
and other waste products ; hepatic cells which have, in 
response to the needs of the organism, descended to the 
menial office of living on the waste products and con- 
verting them to chemical reagents, to facilitate diges- 
tion ; these and numerous other species of cells ; and 
lastly, most important and of greatest interest, nerve 
and brain cells. Most important and of greatest inter- 
est, because this genus of cells is the seat of intelligence, 
and has arisen to a far higher estate than that of their 
more lowly fellows. For intellectually man is some- 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 57 

thing more than a congeries of cell tribes. Otherwise, 
we should have to represent him as a huge sprawling 
amoeboid mass, feeling its way to food, or escaping 
danger by the most rudimentary acts of sensory per- 
ception. 

But when we speak of a man we mean his nervous 
system and brain, so far as personality and intelligence 
are concerned. Such reference is not generally to his 
muscle cells, his hepatic cells, or his blood cells, but 
to those of his nerves and brain, of which all the others 
are but the semi-conscious servants. 

For it is manifest that in muscle, bone, and connec- 
tive tissue we contemplate a certain degradation of 
typical cell life to menial estate. The life of these 
genera of cells goes merely to swell the volume of 
feeling^ or general sense, as distinguished from intelli- 
gence. It is not a high order of cell life, but it gives 
rise to the sense of feeling voluminously. When we 
speak of the intelligence, the intellect, the "soul" of 
man, however, we mean the life of the cells of his brain 
and nerves. 

But how and why has this tissue, this genus of cells, 
— originally not different from others — assumed the 
ascendency and attained this regal supremacy ? Certain 
results from the present writer's own investigations 
may here be introduced as preliminary to an answer. 

While attempting to determine the nature of the 
stimulus which is sometimes communicated to the nuclei 
in the walls of the blood capillaries, inciting them in 
case of damage to a renewed growth after long periods 
of inactivity, a hint was gained as to the manner, or 
rather the means, by which this vital stimulus is con- 
veyed to them. I am not about to speak of the small 



58 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

nerves which are often found entwined around the 
capillary vessels. These, indeed, carry stimuli to the 
capillaries, but reference is now made to interaction in 
a more intimate manner, to wit, that between cell and 
cell. 

To properly set forth and illustrate this condition it 
is necessary to again refer to unicellular life. Begin- 
ning with the amoeboid forms of life and reviewing the 
protozoans, — rhizopods, ciliates, flagellates, et als,^ 
we find that the cell of life, when leading a solitary, 
independent existence, possesses the power to throw out 
from its protoplasmic substance projections (pseudo- 
podia) and filaments. In the better developed proto- 
zoans these projections assume a more or less perma- 
nent character, as cilia and flagella. By means of such 
voluntary or habitual projections, the unicellular crea- 
ture is able to communicate with its fellows, as well as 
to take knowledge of surrounding objects and seize its 
food. Ofttimes these filaments can be quickly thrown 
out or retracted ; they are themselves living matter, 
capable of feeling, and moving in response to it. 

This power and this habit of projecting living fila- 
ments outward are not absent in the millions of histo- 
logical cells or vital units of animal organisms. Even 
in bone the cells send out such communicating threads 
and lines which penetrate the interstices of the non- 
living substance and touch one another. The so-called 
cell wall does not confine or restrict these minute aflili- 
ations of cell contents with cell contents. Such fila- 
ments constitute a living sensory bond between cell 
and cell. Whether these filaments have a degree of 
permanency and continue projected or extended for a 
considerable length of time I have no certain evidence ; 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 59 

but even our crude straining processes exhibit them at 
times. It is quite likely that delicate and protoplasmic 
as they are, being part of the ever changeful living 
matter about the nucleus, these filaments are projected 
and retracted in response to some want or emotion of 
the cell ; that they are not permanent appendages, 
but are sent forth, shortened, or prolonged, according 
to the stress which prompts them and the distance 
which they have to traverse to reach a neighbor cell. 

There are appearances in cells which indicate that 
these out-reaching living lines sometimes traverse a 
neighboring cell, and that a cell may be reached and 
penetrated by several such filaments from a number of 
adjoining cells. A cell may thus be permeated and 
influenced by half a dozen of its fellows at one and the 
same moment. Most probably these delicate living 
tentacles may be and ^re often withdrawn. We can 
more easily believe them to be transient, since they are 
protoplasmic. 

None the less, it is likely that the continuity of sense 
and the individuality of the organism depend largely 
on them ; and that they are the sub-stratum so to speak 
of the nerve system, the delicate changeful ground- 
work of cellular intercourse on which the ego rests. 
The organism of a man, e. g.^ is made up of many 
billions of cells, each a living creature. The cells, in 
fact, constitute the only living part of the body. They 
are the units of life, and it is only by virtue of the sen- 
tient filaments which they emit to each other, that a 
continent sentient tissue results from them. 

Whether these filaments, blending and getting larger 
from cell to cell, constitute the radicles of the nervous 
system, I cannot say. Our present preparation pro- 



60 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

cesses are very unfavorable for tracing such continua- 
tions if they exist. The small nerves proper sometimes 
appear to terminate in relatively gigantic " nerve plates." 
It is probable that nerve cells and nerve tissue proper 
are a distinct genus of cells, acted upon by the cells of 
the contiguous tissues only after a considerable stress 
or tension has accumulated in a given tract and is com- 
municated disjunctly after the manner of the electric 
spark. What I have seen convinces me that there is 
communication by means of living filaments of proto- 
plasm between cell and cell in all the tissues when in 
normal condition. In no tissue is this living connection 
so complete as in nerve tissue and gray cerebral tissue. 
Not unfrequently so many of these living protoplasmic 
filaments enter a cell from neighboring cells as to give 
the cell contents, outside the nucleus, an appearance 
of being a network of protoplasmic threads. This is 
not always the case, however, and apparently depends 
upon the state of vital intercommunication existing in 
a tissue at the time when the preparation of it for the 
microscope was made. 

This filamentous living connection of cell with cell 
may be the under-lying cause and the reason why bil- 
lions of cells can exist as an ego^ an individual animal, 
and exhibit personality. For although separate selves, 
they f^en^e by reason of these mutual filaments each 
other's lives, and feel, each as his fellow feels. In a 
word, they are thus able all to feel as one. 

To resume more concretely, we must conceive of the 
human body as made up of from five to eight hundred 
billions of cells ; and that each cell has developed to its 
present condition during the million of centuries since 
protoplasm first appeared on the earth. For from what 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 61 

we already know of matter, and its well-nigh infinite 
attenuation, we conceive the cell of life to have within 
it ample room for such development ; and that, if we 
could secure the necessary magnifying powers, we 
should behold it as presenting capacity for unbounded 
progress : a world within itself, indeed. Then con- 
template the organic life of man as a union of all these 
diverse genera of cell lives in one, — and some concep- 
tion may be gained how complicated and long-derived 
a result a human life actually is. The intimate arrange- 
ment of a cell of each one of these genera of cells has 
been and stands in the tissues to-day as a work of un- 
told and inestimable toil, a fabric of incalculable price. 
Within those tiny yet augustly capacious modica of 
living matter are compressed and pent the sighs, the 
longings, the strivings, the despairs, the hopes, and the 
joys of millions of years of hapless individual effort. 

Most emphatically is this true of the four pounds of 
brain and nerve tissue in the human organism, repre- 
senting nearly sixty-five millions of cells of the genus 
mens. To be able to set forth even in outline some idea 
of the incomparable cost and value of the living matter 
in human protoplasm, is one of the recent possibilities 
of modern biology. It unfolds a new conception of 
what life really is, and makes possible a new definition 
of the human intellect and soul. 

What we contemplate in the human organism is a 
vast congeries of unicellular life, sensorily united in one 
by living filaments, so that the impulse of life in one is 
felt throughout the others ; and the sentience of one is 
enabled thereby to affect the sentience of another, and 
cause cumulative effects. How sensation is communi- 
cated, that is to say, by means of what mode, or modes 



62 t»LUKICELLtJLAR MAK. 

of energy, whether a simple wave-motion, chemism, or 
electro-motive energy, it is not easy to determine. 
Perhaps, by a combination of modes. 

Certain investigators are inclined to adopt the idea 
of a current of actual particles along the filaments which 
are the prototypes of the nerves, and in fact what may 
be termed capillary nerves ; a current, bearing particles, 
thus constituting a transmission of portions of one cell 
to another and an incorporation of one within another. 
By virtue of such mutual transmissions and incorpora- 
tions, two, or a thousand, cells, are made to feel, act, 
and live as one. 

Keeping in view therefore the means by which many 
cells are able to live in a sentient unity, or personality, 
we revert to the question advanced above : — 

Why and how has the brain become exalted above 
the living matter of the other tissues of the organism ? 

We discover even in unicellular creatures a certain 
massing and condensing of the living matter along axial 
lines of energy, weight, and resistance. Even inside 
the cell and in the protoplasm itself, there may be said 
to be the unstable semblance of an apparatus for the 
application of developed power in the living matter. 
But such apparatus did not become permanent and or- 
ganic till the union of unicellular lives into a living 
creature of larger dimensions had taken place. 

Why such a union ever began to occur, we have not 
space here to suggest reasons. It is certain that it took 
place ; and we are now concerned to mark the results 
which followed it. The general purpose, as is evident, 
was to secure greater liberty and a broader field for 
development. But while this greater liberty and 
broader field for life was gained by a portion of the liv- 



WHENCE AND AVHAT IS THE SOUL? 63 

ing creatures, thus combining together, cell on cell, it 
was for a portion only ; and a part, the larger part, was 
rather degraded than elevated, to secure this boon for 
the more fortunate part. 

This is one of the strange, sad phases of life in terres- 
trial matter, — an aspect which seems world-wide and 
time-long, from lowliest forms of life to the highest. 
A part has been raised up and attained a wonderful 
development, but this result has been reached at the 
expense of another portion which has been obliged to 
step downward to a lowlier lot and assume a heavier 
burden, that a more favored portion may step higher 
and bear a lighter burden. 

The writer freely confesses that this aspect of proto- 
plasmic life is one which he can find no adequate ex- 
planation of under any known system of morals ; and 
one which more than any other has led him to doubt 
whether we have really any moral code which includes 
the general morale of nature. 

The doubt is not whether there is primarily and 
ultimately a moral code in nature and in the universe 
of sentient matter, but rather that in our ignorance of 
the universe we have not as yet apprehended what are 
its real ethics. 

Very soon after animals composed of many cells 
(metazoans) began to exist, the necessities of locomo- 
tion in the struggle for food led to the difierentiation of 
certain tracts of cells as bone and muscle, and finally to 
the development of the entire apparatus for mechanical 
movements. 

Simultaneously, too, another peculiar species of 
differentiation began to be necessary, namely, a special 
tissue, whose office should be that of inter-communica- 



64 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

tion between the different associated cells and tracts of 
cells which were thus assuming more and more diverse 
offices, and becoming somewhat different in character, 
one from another. It was thus and for this reason that 
a nervous system began to be needed and hence to 
develop ; for the plastic, living substance has always 
shown a faculty of adapting itself to widely variant 
functions and modes of living. 

Certain cells began to take up the business of receiv- 
ing sensory influences from outlying cells which were 
hard-pressed, or in want of food, and of transmitting 
such sensory influences to contiguous cells. In short, 
certain lines of internal cells began to take upon them- 
selves the task of conveying the sensations of others 
from one tract of the cellular mass to another tract, and 
of interpreting the sensation received from one tract to 
the comprehension of the sentience of another tract, so 
that action, within its sphere of action, would ensue in 
the second tract. In addition to their own sentient 
economy, these lines of cells in the incipient nervous 
system took up the function of common carriers of sense, 
and also the office of interpreters of the sensory lan- 
guage of one order of cells — if I may borrow the 
figure — to the different language of another order. 

Thus, humbly, as we conclude from observation of 
low forms of life, did the nervous system, or tissue of 
intelligence, begin to develop. Primarily there was 
but one or two simple thread-like lines of cells attempt- 
ing the office of transmitting feeling, and succeeding 
indifferently at first ; but as animals increased in size, 
the business of telegraphing sensation grew, and a net- 
work of lines was developed. Sensation was going 
both ways, and soon the necessity of a common centime 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 65 

to which sensory influences could be brought, and thence 
distributed to their proper destination, was forced upon 
the nascent, sense-conveying cells, and a ganglion, or 
little brain, came into existence. The confusion, too, 
resulting from counter currents of feeling soon led to 
the formation of double lines, — one for transmitting 
sensation inward, the other for transmission outward ; 
and thus the divisions of sensory and motor nerves 
were inaugurated to and from the little brain centre, 
which presently assumed the function of deciding upon 
the merits of transmitted sensations and responding to 
them by a message from its own sensibility. 

Nerve ganglia multiplied, as animals increased in 
bulk, and attempted larger movements ; and in time, to 
avoid confusion and get business done, one ganglion was 
obliged to take the lead and keep order among the other 
ganglia, to decide between them when they got at vari- 
ance, and, generally, to take the office of head ganglion. 

Thus, in time, a larger and capitally important gang- 
lion was raised up into prominence to perform the func- 
tion of oyer and terminer ; a cerebellum and finally a 
cerebrum, — a mass of highly organized cells which have, 
from long use and inherited development, the capacity 
for intelligent perception and thought. 

In the living matter of ganglia and of brain, there is, 
undoubtedly, an arrangement and relative grouping of 
material particles which corresponds to the degree of 
sentient elevation. Brain protoplasm would be found 
to differ in delicacy and complication from bone proto- 
plasm by as much as a brain cell is more intelligently 
sentient than a bone cell. We conclude that the intel- 
lectual faculty of the living matter of the brain must 
be held to rest on a basis of formation or arrangement 



66 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

of the living sentient substance, and on the relationship 
of the particles of that substance one to another. What 
is true of cerebral cells is, beyond doubt, true of bone 
cells, muscle cells, and the cells of all the organic tis- 
sues. Their different functions result from variations 
in their intimate composition. 

Thus, in the end, a kind or order of intellectually 
differentiated protoplasm was developed whose office it 
is to deal with sensation from all the other differen- 
tiated orders of protoplasm, and also to receive through 
the special sense organs impressions from the external 
world; to receive, convey, estimate, and decide on the 
merits and relative character of all these incoming sen- 
sations and perceptions, and finally to assume the 
responsibility of becoming arbiter and director for all 
its associate tissues. But, while receiving this exalted 
development fRom the necessities of its situation in the 
organism and accepting this regal function, it yet 
remains protoplasm in the cell form and living the cell 
life, with the usual nutritive economy, and capable of 
movement by the agency of chemism and, as we hold, 
by the passage of its sentience into will-power which 
directs the movements for which chemism furnishes the 
larger share of the motive force. 

Not all, indeed, of the brain and nervous system is 
composed of living matter of so exalted a grade ; por- 
tions of it are but the frame-work upon which the gray 
matter rests and by means of which it is able to act. 
By the tissue of intellect, as here spoken of, is meant 
the portion in which self-consciousness appears and 
intellectual processes inhere : the regal gray substance 
of which all the nerve fibres, trunks, and adjunctive 
ganglia are the instruments. 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 67 

Thus we see that in the organism, containing per- 
haps twenty pounds of protoplasm, at least seventeen 
pounds have been to a certain degree degraded from 
the original condition, seen in unicellular life, to less 
sentient, special and servile offices, in order to serve 
and raise up to the estate of intelligence the more fav- 
ored two or three pounds. 

In the larger sense, the result may be said to have 
amply justified the means ; for that result is the human 
intellect, in place of a mass of protoplasm of low sen- 
tient coefficient. 

At first we observe a partial degradation of virgin 
protoplasm to a lower status of sensibility, as seen in 
cartilage, bone, sinew, connective tissue and blood; 
liver, spleen, and glandular tissue ; cuticle, hair, nails, 
and teeth. By this sacrifice, support, defence and 
an apparatus for locomotion and mechanical work were 
secured, along with the facilities for assimilation and 
digestion of food ; also vision, hearing, taste, and smell. 
It is upon this sub-structure, the sentience of which 
has been lowered, or diverted to the production of 
mechanical effects, that the ennobled protoplasm of in- 
tellect rests and depends. 

To the gray living matter of brain and ganglia, 
highly elaborated and correspondingly delicate, the 
lowlier tissues offer protection from the cold, rough 
environment amidst which we live and move. Housed 
about by bone, hair, and hide, sustained aloft in nature 
by brawn which moves it at its sovereign pleasure, fed 
by alimentary and vascular tissue which labors inces- 
santly that it may have prepared food brought to its 
door, the royal encephalon has had the opportunity to 
develop to intellect. Intelligence is as much the life 



68 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

of the brain, as contractility is the life of muscle ; but it 
represents, and is objectively represented by, an 
arrangement which, compared with that of muscle pro- 
toplasm, must be marvellously delicate and elaborate. 
Yet but for this reduction and subjection of the muscle 
and bone protoplasm to secure these protective, defen- 
sive, and otherwise provident advantages, intellect could 
never have come into being. 

Eecently — since " phrenology " ran its erratic 
course — considerable progress has been made in 
"mapping" the human brain, with a view to locating 
the various " faculties " of the intellect ; and so far as 
this much-needed work has progressed, the results 
lend strength to the several conclusions set forth in this 
paper. 

But an important fact must not here be lost sight of, 
one concerning which a close study of the cell of life in 
human tissues enables us to speak with certainty, and 
one which is not without significance in an attempt to 
learn what the intellect, or "soul" of man really is. 
Even the brain is not composed wholly of living 
matter which is subjective on the side of personal 
intelligence ; it passes by different degrees into ohjec- 
live matter. This, indeed, is the case, to some ex- 
tent, even inside the most delicate and highly differ- 
entiated cell in the " gray matter." Even in the 
branched gray cells, there is matter which is apparently 
more earthy and less purely subjective than the rest. 
Not half, not a third, of the cerebrum is entirely the 
tissue of intellect. If any one tract, or division, of the 
brain were purely intellectual tissue, isolated by itself, 
we should unhesitatingly apply the term intellect to this 
tract. 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 69 

From the errata of nutrition there are imported into 
the protoplasmic substance unassimilated products 
("formed matter") of previous protoplasmic life, as 
also inorganic particles, so that it is impossible to 
speak of even the apparently living matter of the brain 
as purely intellectual tissue. It is probable that this 
I alloying of the living subjective matter with non-living 
objective matter extends far below the ken of the mi- 
croscope, and that the finest food particles, even after 
they are drawn into the nucleus of a cell and have ap- 
parently become incorporated into the living matter as 
a part of the protoplasnjic substance, are yet some- 
times far from being wholly transformed into the living 
condition. We conceive, indeed, that the purest ter- 
restrial protoplasm, if subjected to a vastly higher 
power of amplification, would present to our vision an in- 
trinsically dissimilar and often incongruous mass, made 
up of tracts and streams of actually living matter, really 
subjective and altogether sentient, mingled with lumps 
and unregenerate tracts of matter, still retaining the 
structure of the formed matter of other organisms 
from which it had been taken to serve as food. 

In the gray matter of the brain, we doubt not, would 
be found the purest protoplasm, that least alloyed with 
adventitious substances. To what depths of the atom- 
icity of matter this condition of the alloy of the subjec- 
tive by the objective extends, it would be vain to con- 
jecture. Very far, it is quite likely, for even the 
imagination finds diflSculty in picturing the purely sub- 
jective living condition of matter as separable from 
the objecti\^e non-living and gross condition under which 
the bulk of all matter outside that within our own indi- 
vidual quota presents itself to our personal perception. 



70 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

At the risK of iteration, the terms objective and sub- 
jective matter, as herein used in relation to living matter 
and its attribute of free will, may again be defined a 
little more fully. By the subjective matter of a living 
organism is'meant the living matter in the cells, joined 
together by cell filaments and the nervous system, and 
constituting that co-sentient substance in which the 
self-conscious personality appears. In a word, living 
matter, so fully and sentiently united, that it consti- 
tutes a self-mass, to the perception of which all other 
matter in the world appears to be not self^ but some- 
thing outside of self . 

In separate, unicellular life, the entire world is ob- 
jective matter to each cell — or nucleus of a cell — rep- 
resenting an infusorial creature and constituting an 
individual life. 

In inorganic matter, too, the entire world may be 
objective to every separate particle or " atom." 

But the consentient relationship of particle to par- 
ticle, in protoplasm, enables a million particles to unite 
in a cell, as a self^ and band together in regarding all 
save their own company as objective and external. 

In pluricellular creatures, where millions of cells are 
associated in animal tissues, and cell is linked to cell 
by living protoplasmic filaments, a larger self is pos- 
sible, including, albeit somewhat less perfectly, all 
those millions of smaller selves in one larger, stronger 
personality to which the world outside is, in turn, ob- 
jective. 

Protoplasm, then, is that blending or relationship of 
material particles which permits of the growth of per- 
sonality, from the lowly self-sentience of a material 
particle up to that of a human intellect. 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 71 

The subjective living matter of the human organism 
is that which is so closely combined in the co-sentient 
state, that it establishes a limit about itself and sets a 
boundary mark between self and non-self, and which is 
able to look out from the citadel of self-hood upon all 
the rest of the universe, as upon something external 
and objective. Subjective living matter is that which 
is on the self side of personal perception and feeling ; 
the personal side of the boundary between sentience and 
that which sentience passes into when, transformed to 
will power, it compasses the movement of objective or 
outer matter ; or in other words, when it passes out of 
the static sentient condition into effect. 

Such a modicum of subjective living matter is sub- 
jective, even as it is self-conscious, only to itself; to the 
perception of all other living creatures, it is as objective 
as is a stone. 

The most perfect example of such subjectivity would 
perhaps be the smallest possible particle, or " atom" of 
matter, in its consciousness of itself But in the con- 
nected protoplasm of an animal organism there is pos- 
sible, from its co-sentient relationship, a quantitative 
increase and a projection of self-hood from one particle 
to many. 

A cell appears to have been the largest coherent mass 
of living matter into which self-hood at first extended, 
in early terrestrial life. 

The various tissues of the animal organism also possess 
a species of personality, not all of which is surrendered 
into the personality of the brain tissue. Every separate 
cell of the tissues, too, retains to a considerable degree 
its tiny personality. But the nerve and brain tissue, 
from its coherence and close relation, cell to cell, forms 



72 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

a practically complete and well rounded personality ; a 
mass of living matter, over which the subjective cordon 
of selfdom is powerfully projected. In the brain and 
nerves there is so continuous a connection of the living 
gray matter by means of filaments from cell to cell, that 
the whole forms a practically unified mass in which the 
subjective self-conscious state prevails. It is the co- 
herent, living, gray mass which, so far as it is purely 
living matter, constitutes the intellect. To this portion 
of the organism all the rest of the world is objective. 

The mere avoirdupois of the subject will portray to 
any thinker why it is that quite a portion of the body 
of a person appears to his intellect to be of the nature 
of external matter and objective. In a hundred and 
fifty pounds^ weight — that of an average human organ- 
ism — there is from fifteen to twenty pounds, according 
to the age, of what we term protoplasm. Of this about 
four pounds may be classed as the tissue of intellect ; 
but it is not likely that more than a single pound of it 
is actually ^i^re living matter: protoplasm, unalloyed 
by " formed matter " and inorganic matter, and in the 
coherent, consentient state of personality. 

All the rest is more or less in the condition of objec- 
tivity, and external to the self-consciousness ; and in 
this, indeed, biology but demonstrates the testimony of 
our common sense which constantly gives the impres- 
sion that our bodies are in part of non-living matter, 
not strictly of the nature of our consentient, self-con- 
scious part ; but that there is yet within us a part which 
is living and self-conscious; that which thinks, which 
perceives, and which can will effects in external objec- 
tive matter. 

The gravest biological question which has come into 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 73 

prominence within the last decade — not without able 
adherents on both sides — is that of the interaction of 
consciousness with motion in protoplasm. 

By consciousness I here mean to include self-con- 
sciousness ; for all consciousness is self-consciousness 
in less or greater degree. 

It has been held that self-consciousness or intelligence 
is an incidental and passive accompaniment of proto- 
plasmic life, incapable of influencing it ; in a word, that 
the intellect is but a chip on the wave of protoplasmic 
life ; a something which superadds itself to organized 
living matter, from an independent and unknown source. 
It follows, of course, from such an hypothesis that there 
is no such thing as free will in living matter ; that sub- 
jective matter has no real power over objective matter ; 
and that intellect is but a fly on the wheel of evolution. 

Several very fanciful definitions of the intellect and 
the " soul " have of late sprung from this hypothesis ; 
definitions which are highly unsatisfactory, because they 
reduce what we all actually mean by the terms intellect 
and soul to something so ethereal, unsubstantial, and 
uninteresting from a personal point of view, as to make 
the fate of it before or after death a matter of indifier- 
ence. 

This hypothesis has found admission to the considera- 
tion of reputable biologists only from the difficulty 
experienced in tracing self-consciousness into will and 
will into motion of objective matter. It became evi- 
dent that the former theory of a direct passage of 
volition into chemism was an error; and this hypothe- 
sis of a disjunct self-consciousness is the transient 
expression of a doubt Avhether there is any such inter- 
action as previously claimed. 



74 PLURlCELLtrLAR MAl^. 

During the past year the present writer has made an 
extended study of intracellular hunger and the nature 
of nutritive energy, — the results of which may, perhaps, 
be presented hereafter. One result of these studies, at 
least, has been to convince me that there is an esoteric 
plane of matter below chemism, where self-perception 
is able to cumulate in volition and inaugurate motion. 
I have no longer a doubt of it, nor that the testimony 
of our common sense, that we can really will effects 
and accomplish something in the world of matter, is 
truthful and not a self-deception. 

It is evident that, if we could eliminate from the proto- 
plasm of the gray brain all non-living particles of still 
objective, unregenerate matter and be sure that we had 
in that gray substance only particles which had entered 
into the full consentient relationship which constitutes 
the highest estate and type of living matter, such sub- 
stance might be properly defined by the word intellect, 
— that which knows. 

Define we therefore this quota of purely living mat- 
ter of the brain as the intellect : that part of us which 
is intelligent, thinks, is self-conscious, remembers, is 
capable of imagery and can will effects out into contig- 
uous matter not included within itself. 

The advanced step of thus including within a defini- 
tion of the word intellect the living matter of the brain 
as well as the sentient constant of that matter, is taken 
advisedly, and for the reason that matter and its sentient 
constant are not known to exist separately. We have 
no warrant to speak of them as disjoint. 

The isolation of the sentient constant of matter is 
undoubtedly impossible ; — as impossible as the squar- 
ing of the circle, the chronometry of eternity, the mens- 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 75 

uration of infinity, or the division of 100,000+ by 3 
witliout a remainder. 

In this connection, mind may be incidentally defined 
as the intellect in activity ; and in another sense as the 
general business of the intellect. 

On the whole, the writer can find no good or suffi- 
cient authority in the facts of biology for defining the 
soul otherwise than as the intellect, as above set 
forth. 

There have been a thousand fanciful and more or 
less inadequate definitions of the soul of man by classic 
philosophers, creed-makers, and more modern meta- 
physicians. But by the soul is here meant the intellect 
with retained powers of thought, emotion, and intellect- 
ual life, in a word, that which we all personally desire 
to save^ or have saved, for further life. 

Anything less infthe way of a definition of the human 
soul is merely a diversion which will always be unsat- 
isfactory, insufficient. 

It is here worthy of remark that the souls, or intel- 
lects, of all human beings are, from the biological point 
of view, very imperfect, that is to say, the living 
matter of which they are composed is not even approx- 
imately pure or well blended, cell to cell. As an 
organ too, the intellectual tissue is structurally im- 
perfect, resembling a house built room after room by 
the addition of lean-tos, ells, and porches, each an 
afterthought, rather than an edifice reared upon a well- 
drafted, pre-existent plan. 

It will be apparent from the first step of this inquiry 
that the latest biological conclusion touching the in- 
tellect or soul does not contemplate it as separable from 
the organism, or capable of emigration from the earth. 



76 PLURICELLULAR MAN* 

or of residence in other organisms on earth, or of pas- 
sage through contiguous objective matter and space ; 
nor yet of disembodied emigration from the earth to 
distant quarters of the universe. Such a conception of 
the soul is contrary to all that we know of it from 
biological investigation and is, we believe, an idea 
founding on nothing more creditable than Oriental 
fable and the observation of morbid or abnormal con- 
ditions of the human brain. We do not see any reason 
to believe that it is possible or can ever be possible, 
under nature, for the intellect or soul to be separated 
or dis-associated from the organism in which it has been 
raised up and of which it is a part. We make this 
statement qualified by the phrase, under nature; for we 
do not here raise the question of a supernatural rescue 
of the soul from the decaying organism. 

Biology regards the human soul as a far-derived and 
complex result of protoplasmic life. The fabric of it 
is living matter wrought by all its ancestry since pro- 
toplasm first stirred on the earth. Since the earliest 
metazoic ganglion first served as a little brain, with 
special senses servant to it, the development of the 
soul began. It is the formative arrangement of parti- 
cles and their co-sentient relationship one with another 
which constitutes intelligence and which is requisite to 
make the gray living matter intellect. In illustration, 
if an equal mass and weight of bone protoplasm, or 
muscle protoplasm, or liver protoplasm were put in the 
place of the gray brain protoplasm, we should not have 
intellect, or soul, inside the skull, although we might 
have sentience of low grade. Muscle protoplasm has 
developed along its line of ancestry with a view and 
purpose to accomplish contractility and attain a high 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 77 

degree of excellence in this specialty. It is sentient, 
but in low degree, its internal arrangement and energy 
having been turned to the task of self-movement length- 
wise and breadthwise. It is possible if some unusual 
change of its conditions of existence should call for the 
reception of impressions from the external world and 
the assumption of the function of nerves and brain, that 
even a cell of muscular protoplasm might, in time, 
relinquish its office of contractility and, in the course 
of ages, develop the capacity to receive the data of 
knowledge and become intelligent. For living matter 
is wonderfully self-adaptive to its environment and sus- 
ceptible to the stress of the circumstances by which it 
is conditioned. But to change the internal arrangement 
of a muscle cell to that of a brain cell, or to build up 
the peculiar arrangement of such a brain cell from even 
a cell of undifferentiated, virgin protoplasm like that 
which we see in primitive unicellular life, would no 
doubt require a time period at which even a paleontolo- 
gist would heave a sigh. 

For were such a cell of living matter magnified till it 
should equal the earth in apparent size, the particles, 
such as we know it to be composed of, would still be 
no larger than grains of sand ; and in its complex and 
delicate arrangement, we conceive that a cell of the 
gray brain would call for the exact and elaborate group- 
ing of all these particles, one with another, in a particu- 
lar manner and at particular distances apart ; and that, 
still further, these groups of particles would be arranged 
in well-nigh infinite patterns, standing for the mnemonic 
tracery of color, sound, and sense — equal in intricacy 
to the arrangement of the single letters and words of a 
vast library of books, piled tier on tier upon a thousand 



78 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

shelves. This picture, indeed, would fall pigmy-short 
of the real facts. 

As a factor of the intellect and soul we must involve 
ancestral effects in the brain substance from an experi- 
ence of life through time which is only subtended by 
the epochs of geology. Time and experience of the 
living matter have entered as formal factors into the 
human soul and could not be withdrawn from it with- 
out a reduction of the co-sentient relationship of the 
soul substance ; a reduction, descending to the low, 
early sentience of primordial protoplasm. 

It is upon this elaborate fabric wrought in the proto- 
plasm of intellect, that intelligence depends, and with- 
out which the intellect or soul would be no longer 
rational, or intellectual. 

Disorganized, the particles of the gray brain matter 
would not be destroyed, indeed, and would be at once 
available for use in other protoplasm, yet would be no 
better for such use than any other particles ; for they 
would retain each only its primordial sentient constant ; 
since the relationship and arrangement in which they 
stood in the brain cells alone represented knowledge 
and intelligence. 

The dissolution of the brain substance as surely 
presages the dissolution of intelligence and the cessa- 
tion of mind, as the taking to pieces of a clock and the 
smelting of the metal wheels, argues the cessation of 
its function as a time-recording apparatus. In the one 
case the metal in a homogeneous mass would remain, 
but not a clock ; in the other, the homogeneously sen- 
tient matter would remain, but not an intellect, in the 
sense in which alone a person's soul is valuable to him, 
or worth preservation. 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 79 

Such a conclusion may dissipate certain fond and 
long-indoctrinated illusions, yet none the less the real 
fact and the truth should always be sought and, when 
perceived, adhered to. For in all the universe there is 
no such precious pearl as truth. Truth — despite all 
the specious reasonings of some modern pessimistsand 
bad philosophers — is always healthful to life ; and its 
discovery tends to the achievement of immortal life. 

When from the subjective side, we attempt to take 
cognizance of our personality, by introspection of its 
phenonena, the results of our self-search confirm this 
conclusion. 

For example, when we self-consciously think, there is 
first sentience, or perception of the impressions pre- 
viously received (memory) in the large multipolar cells 
beneath the cortex of the brain, and we are at the same 
time conscious of an^ intellectual efibrt — which effort is 
the intercommunication of hundreds and thousands of 
these cells, each an individual self, in which are stored 
the experience of the outer world, obtained through the 
special and general senses. This experience is gar- 
nered there as the form of objects seen, sounds heard, 
contacts felt and, in general, all manner of experi- 
ences, simple and complex. This wonderful capacity 
for form also includes opinions and conclusions arrived 
at by previous thinking. Our personal perception 
represents all this to us as something pictured and based 
on form and figure, representing dimensions and 
material symbolism ; in a word, something dependent 
on an arrangement of the material component sub- 
stance, or living matter, in relationship, particle to 
particle. We are subjectively conscious, too, that but 
for this form and relationship we should be without 



80 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

the data for thought and should possess sentience only. 
Memory implies form and arrangement in the cell 
contents, and thinking founds on a sentient interchange 
of individual memory, cell with cell, and dijfferent 
special tracts of cells one with another. 

Thus it is that knowledge depends on experience. 
But for experience the brain would be merely sentient, 
incapable of intelligent thought, or reason, or memory. 
When we speak of the intellect or soul, we mean the 
organized, formed, experienced living substance of the 
brain cells, not their sentient capacity only. 

Pluricellular man : Whence is his soul ? 

Let him who knows whence came matter with its 
sentient constant, answer. 

On the vast breadth of Void has appeared a mystery 
which men now call Matter^ but whose real name, like 
that of Rome, no tongue may utter. 

What is the soul ? 

It is the developed and experienced living matter of 
the body, particularly that in the cells of the nerve 
ganglia and of the brain par excellence. Self-conscious- 
ness and personality are not located exclusively in any 
one cell of living matter, or tract of such cells, but in 
the whole continent mass, although it is manifest that 
it is centralized and largely, very largely, located in 
the brain ; and the development of that organ, as shown 
by the position, course, and termination of nerve fibres, 
would indicate that the gray matter of the corpora striata^ 
thalami and corpora quadrigemina may be its sedes. 

Too much importance need not be given such local- 
ization, however. The human brain is by no means an 



WHENCE AND WHAT IS THE SOUL? 81 

ideally developed organ, but resembles rather some an- 
tique family mansion which has grown, by frequent 
annexes and the addition of ells and gables, through 
many generations. The point of real importance is, 
that every cell of it contains not only the data of memory 
and life experience, but these data set down in a sentient 
substance, sentiently recorded and arranged, every par- 
ticle of which substance goes to swell the organic self- 
consciousness. Personality, or self-consciousness, must 
not be dissociated from these mnemonic data and por- 
trayed as a something distinct from them. These data 
in the cells, the results of life experience, are them- 
selves self-conscious. 

Given present, matter, elementally sentient, the soul 
of pluricellular man is the consentient living matter 
(cells) of his intellectual tissue, developed and con- 
tinent of the results of development, since protoplasm 
first appeared on the earth. 

Take from this definition any constituent, and from 
the "soul" of man which it describes, some necessary 
attribute will be found wanting. 

Let not this definition of the soul be misunderstood, 
nor judged according to the old formula of theological 
criticism. 

Not matter inert, insentient, is soul, — there is no such 
matter in the world, — but matter, the universal em- 
bodiment of power, life, and intelligence ; the sentient, 
cosmic proteus, the archeus of nature ; matter which 
holds the mitial elements of life and tends to develop 
human and divine intelligence in the ascending orders 
of terrestrial life ; matter which under favorable con- 



82 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

ditions will approximate omniscience and attain omni- 
potence ; matter which as we know it on earth, 
elementally sentient only, may yet have developed 
divinely on elder orbs of cosmos, not once but a thou- 
sand times, across the wide reaches of the eternal past, 
and have within its scheme unnumbered developments 
in the eternal future. 

Every religious system of mankind which has included 
philosophy and culture has in the end developed an 
equivalent conception. Brahma broods self-contempla- 
tive, alternately diffusing himself abroad and re-deifying 
his powers. Jehovah and God, in the slow refinements 
of Christian theology, are already taking on the form 
and lineaments of Brahma. 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 83 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 

Within the last decade, biological researches have 
shed a flood of light on this long mysterious question 
of the fate of man after death. Discovery, in the field 
of living matter^ has added fact to fact till we have 
what may fairly be termed a science of living matter y 
which embraces much certain knowledge on subjects 
hitherto obscure. It is indeed as if a powerful beam 
of electric light were projected into some musty sub- 
terranean chamber, some dank old tomb of Pharaohs, 
the haunt of ghostly superstitions, noisome with legends 
still half believed, of Styx and hells, and fulsome with 
too dulcet promises of paradise ; a strange, abnormal 
nether world of fancy and fantasy, long in need of the 
wholesome light of day. 

Into this old kingdom of shades our science has shot 
its beam, and lo ! as when at dawn the ghosts and bats 
and ravening things of night slink away and vanish, so 
here old fables, spookism, and all the sacerdotal phantas- 
magoria of eld fade out suddenly ; and the actual facts 
are seen to be quite simple. 

Something of poetry and certain too fond dreams of 
post-mortal Nirvanas are undoubtedly dissipated by the 
keen bright light and the in-rush of fresh air. Many 
whose minds have long fed on legend and faith will 
experience a certain sadness and sinking of hope, as the 
truth is seen to be difierent from old creeds. 



84 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

It could not be otherwise. The actual facts of life 
are never so fine as those mirages of our longings, which 
it is the mission of science to disperse ; and some there 
are who will still prefer illusion to fact, so be that they 
can derive a little more present comfort. Only a few, 
however. The good hard sense of a majority of man- 
kind will always prefer fact to self-deception. 

And here, too, as in many another instance, where 
olden error has given place to younger truth, after the 
first sense of loss and disappointment is past, the facts 
will be seen to form the basis and the earnest of a better 
faith, broader, more ennobling, which during the next 
century will possess mankind, presenting loftier ideals, 
prompting to purer endeavor and greater achievement. 
Already such a faith is in the world. Its stern, new 
gospel sets forth a scheme of moral and physical regen- 
eration, such as has never been taught before. It con- 
templates the complete control by man of the energies 
of nature, the paradisation of the earth and the pro- 
longation of life. 

With a^general reference to the theory and definition 
given of the human intellect, or soul, in the preceding 
paper, the psychic question of this one may be an- 
swered in no uncertain terms. 

In universal matter we behold a substance at once ob- 
jective and subjective in a manner at present inexplicable 
to human intelligence. It consists of particles ; whether 
divisible infinitely or ultimately indivisible is not yet 
known. This is known, however : the particles of matter 
as small as the quadrillionth of a grain in weight possess 
each a certain property or quota of energy which is 
never known to vary in tension or be separated from it. 
In whatever relation to other particles this specified 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 85 

particle may enter, through all the multitudinous com- 
binations, actions, and reactions of terrestrial and cosmic 
chemism, it always evinces and can never be robbed 
or in any way deprived of this its natural endowment 
of energy. In fact, the constancy of gravitation, the 
coefficient of electro-magnetic activity, the entire econ- 
omy of heat, light, and world formation, — in a word, 
the stability and rationale of the whole visible universe 
of suns and worlds rests and depends on the unvarying 
attribute or property of the particle. 

Streams of these particles enter the cell of life con- 
stantly, assume while in it a certain peculiar relation- 
ship one to another, and while in this relationship, the 
group or cell thus formed/fee?s, lives^ or, in other words, 
exhibits the subjective side of mattei . As a result of 
this self-consciousness the cell contents exhibits individ- 
uality ; i. e., acts and behaves like an independent little 
world within the greater world. Even as the universe 
evinces personality on a vast scale, the cell of terres- 
trial life shows individuality on a small scale. The 
universe displays a certain grand personality which 
mankind has always been inclined to deify in one way 
or another, although there is little reason to think — 
every reason, indeed, not to think — it of a high order 
of intelligence, but rather of low sentience. 

As the universe of matter pursues its courses and 
acts from a manifest inward impulsion of sentient self- 
hood, even so the little cell of living matter is seen to 
move this way and that about its personal business, a 
tiny reduplication of the all-inclosing macrocosm. 

The material particles departing from the cell and 
dropping out of the protoplasmic relationship, are seen 
to have lost no iota of their original energy. Again, 



86 I>LURIC]&LLULAR MAJ^. 

after a few hours or days, they may re-enter and become 
a constituent part of the same cell, perhaps, again ex- 
hibiting the same ability to feel and live there, ere long 
to depart as before. 

From these data the conclusion has been derived 
that, underlying the quota of energy constantly exhib- 
ited by every particle there is a static sentient property 
which we have termed the sentient-constant, or subjec- 
tive component, of universal matter ; for the universe 
of matter exhibits a self-actuating power which can 
arise only from a sentient or subjective property. In 
like manner the protoplasmic cell evinces a self-directive 
power which we know to be the result of sentience. 

Hence the theorem of this treatise, namely, that 
matter is at bottom sentient matter and the universe a 
living^ self-moving universe, there being on an esoteric 
and profound plane of the former, a passage of sen- 
tience into motion. 

We hold this position to be logically impregnable on 
any other ground than that there is in cosmos an alien 
force not of it, but injected into it, from some point out- 
side it ; and there is nothing in nature as we know it 
which requires such an hypothesis to explain phenom- 
ena. Such an hypothesis, moreover, can be shown to 
be immoral. 

The particles of matter — divisible still, or finally 
indivisible — are hence of the nature of sentient units 
and the prototypes of immortality in the universe, since 
they present themselves as synonymes of the inde- 
structible and the eternal. 

Of such sentient units the intellect or soul of man is 
a temporary aggregation possessing the elements, in- 
deed, of immortal life, but ephemeral as yet by reason 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 87 

of the vicissitudes and destructive influences of the 
crude, rough, tumultuous habitat in which it lives. 

The soul, literally speaking, is or contains part and 
parcel of a quantity of living matter or protoplasm, 
which began life on the earth's surface one hundred 
millions of years ago, as it is likely, — literally a part 
of that identical protoplasm which alternately, as a 
germ or fertilized ovum^ expands by growth into an 
organism and recedes into a germ. 

Carried away by this view, certain biologists have 
even defined the soul of man as this deathless "germ- 
plasm," and pictured it as realizing the immortality to 
which the human intellect aspires. But which one of 
us would be long satisfied with such an immortality as 
that? — the survival of an ovum! It requires but a 
moment of clear reflection to see that it is only in the 
full grown brain and nerve ganglia that personality 
rises to the proportions of the soul, that soul which we 
so ardently desire to secure '^ salvation " for. It is the 
intellectual tissue of the organism at its best and full- 
est growth which constitutes the soui, not the imper- 
sonal little germ of a human life, seen in the reproduc- 
tive elements. The germ is but a very limited, 
imperfect method of immortal life, a little better than 
extinction but attended by the utter loss of memory 
and personality. Moreover, as can be shown, the 
germ form of survival is a mode or condition resulting 
from stress of a hard theatre of life. The only con- 
dition or estate of the human soul really worth saving, 
from the individual or personal point of view, is the 
full-grown organic estate, and that alas ! still perishes 
with the organism. 

The sentient particles of matter, indeed, survive an4 



88 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

enter other organisms, but personality, memory, and 
general intelligence are dissolved and lost ; and it is 
personality and memory which of all things we are most 
anxious to save. No form or promise of immortality 
which omits personality and memory can ever be grateful 
or satisfactory to man. The human aspiration is ever 
toward fuller personality, clearer memory, and greater 
intelligence than experienced in the present limited 
life-time. 

What becomes of the soul ? 

First, what becomes of the soul during life? 

In attempting to give an answer direct to this latter 
question, it will be necessary to reopen a discussion 
briefly alluded to in the preceding paper. 

Owing to the difficulties at present attending a demon- 
stration of the interaction of sentience with motion, there 
has arisen a new sect of fatalists in biological science, who 
assume that sentience and self-consciousness in the cell, 
do not interact to produce movement, but are adventi- 
tious phenomena — an apparition appearing there from 
another sphere, between which and motion there is no 
correlation, no interaction. Sentience and self-con- 
sciousness — according to this theory — appear in the 
'brain as an incidental sequence, but have no power 
to influence protoplasmic activity there ; and intelli- 
gence is, therefore, a mysterious something from 
somewhere which descends or ascends and alights on 
protoplasm. 

This hypothesis is gratuitous. Its only raison 
d'etre is the fact that the correlation between sentience 
and motion is not yet fully der nstrated. It is, in 
short, an argument of the famous " missing link " variety. 
"Find the missing link," exclaimed, for years, the 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 89 

opponents of evolution ; " you have not found it, 
hence there is no evolution." 

Certain adherents of this theory of incidental sentience 
in nature have, of late, tripped very innocently in their 
ratiocination, putting forward the doctrine that while 
man can do nothing personally by self-effort of his 
intellect, the human race may be improved by a match- 
ing-off of one physical law against another ! The fact 
that this act of matching-off implies an effect of intelli- 
gence in physics, appears to have been quite lost sight of. 

If self-consciousness is an adventitious incident in 
nature, then, indeed, does fate prevail and every pessi- 
mist is a wise man. There is no "free will " in living 
matter; and nature, whether benignly devised, or a 
"devil's game at skittles," will run its course uninflu- 
enced and unimproved by human effort. In a word, the 
theory is immoral and the distemper of its immorality 
will be felt by any one who attempts to think it out 
to its logical conclusion. It resembles many another 
theory of closet philosophers, so very many of which 
are contributed to modern philosophy, profound after a 
manner, yet murky, presenting some phase of truth 
with elaborate patience, yet failing to open the question 
up from top to bottom in a clear light. All such have 
first to be corrected for aberration and bad relativity. 

If the sentient hypothesis of matter and of the universe 
is correct, if free will in living matter is not the most 
cruel of delusions, if humanity has any power to advance 
itself in the world, then sentience does interact with 
motion^ and self-consciousness is able to will movement 
in matter, A fuller demonstration of this great truth 
will be attempted in the future ; here, for the present, 
it is assumed to be true. 



90 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

It is not held here, however, that sentience passes by 
a direct saltus into visible motion, any more than would 
be argued that sunlight passes directly into the mo- 
tion of the piston of a steam-engine, overlooking the 
intermediate steps of vegetation, oxidation, and aqueous 
expansion. So in the case of the interaction of self- 
consciousness in living matter, with movement outward, 
there is action on inferior planes of matter, a succession 
of steps, which we indistinctly perceive, when we think 
of willing an act. 

The static sentient constant of the ]f)articles of mat- 
ter is, we conceive, sustained at integrity from the 
equilibrium of cosmos. Every exercise of the will, 
every designed direction of self-conscious attention, 
draws on and expends the sentient property of matter in 
motion of contiguous particles. For motion in nature 
is of sentient origin, subjective as delivered from one 
particle to another, objective after the impulse is re- 
ceived by the second particle — objective ever after- 
wards, indeed, till in the cycle of the universe the 
objective returns to its source. Thus the self-conscious- 
ness of the soul is projected outward, by will, into 
contiguous matter, and man becomes a matter-moving 
agent in the world. 

The bulk of self-consciousness, ^. e., the aggregated 
sentience of the cells of the organism, is expended in 
thinking J in sustaining personality, and maintaining the 
organism in function. 

The cells of the various tissues, the glandular and 
the muscular, for example, are employed in preparing 
and storing up chemical substances from which, through 
a chain of katabolic reductions, locomotion and diges- 
tion may be performed, processes to which the organic 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 91 

consciousness has but to give an initial impulse. The 
personal self-consciousness of every living organism is 
an agent from which effects or icork may be derived, 
and the quantity and quality of this work will be in 
proportion to the medium furnished it for passing into 
effect. One person might spend his intellect in thinking 
merely, and die without leaving any perceptible record 
of this thought. Another, superadding the muscular 
contraction of his fingers in forming legible characters, 
might think the same or similar thoughts and set them 
in intelligible array before the world, thus vastly influ- 
encing his fellows. It is largely a question of the means 
of transferrence and record. So of the statesman, so 
of the inventor, the commander, the monarch ; there are 
thousands who could do as much and as well, or better, 
than these, but have lacked the means of thus project- 
ing their intellects into effects. 

How large a part of this purely personal energy is 
constantly expended and demanded to sustain the 
organism in function, or maintain life, has never been 
exactly determined, and apparently varies in different 
organisms and at various stages of life ; a large part, 
nine tenths of it, considered as a matter-moving agency, 
probably, yet a part is available for work outside the 
organism. From bodily habit and the conditions of the 
intra-organic draughts on the intellectual tissue, little 
heed is taken of these expenditures for the most part ; 
and in making use of terms so purely dynamic, it 
seems again necessary to state distinctly that the inter- 
action of consciousness with motion is entirely intracel- 
lular, and that in the ordinary visible bodily functions 
there is never a direct passage of sentience or the sub- 
jective state into movement, or objective phenomena. 



92 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

This interaction takes place on an interior plane of mat- 
ter within protoplasm proper. 

But from the connection of cell with cell by proto- 
plasmic filaments, and the devotion of different tissues 
or tracts of cells to the production of substances of 
various degrees of chemical tension, digestion, circula- 
tion, and assimilation are accomplished, as also muscular 
contraction, locomotion, work, and mental processes. 
None the less, the sentience, more or less developed, 
within the cell gives the initial, directive impulse. 
From that inaugural and directive impulse sets off all 
that man does, all that the race has done on the earth's 
surface; and in the giving of that impulse, the soul is 
hourly, daily, and yearly expended, as long as the per- 
son lives. Obedient to that impulse, the magazine of 
chemical and mechanical energy stored up in the organ- 
ism, may raise a weight of a hundred pounds to the top 
of a mountain, or slowly lower the same w^eight down 
the mountain. It is not that personal intelligence is 
transformed to the mechanical power which does this 
work, or is the direct dynamic equivalent of it, but that 
it goes into a directive impulse which determines when^ 
how^ and to what purpose the organic energy shall be 
expended. 

The elemental sentience of a number of tons of mat- 
ter contributes to the soul of a human beino; durino^ its 
seventy or eighty years of life. The character or plan 
of that life as uttered by the organism, is, even during 
life, gradually marred and obliterated. The clear per- 
ception of pleasure and pain, of truth and error is, in 
the vast majority of persons, slowly dimmed and de- 
stroyed, owing to the "aging" of the organism. But 
although the personality of such a soul is outworn and 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 93 

approaching dissolution, the work which it has inaugu- 
rated in contiguous matter remains a more or less endur- 
ing result of its life. In a certain sense, the soul 
survives in this work. This is of itself a species of 
immortality, but not that boon of life which we so 
earnestly long for. 

To trace the continuous expenditure of the human 
intellect for any given time, a minute, an hour, or a 
year, is one of the most interesting of investigations. 
It is this expenditure of intelligence which underlies 
the entire progressive development of organisms on the 
earth. 

To develop the human body and the tissue of intel- 
lect, the intelligences of a long series of animal orders 
have been expended through vast time periods. The 
" souls " of these older animal orders were all put forth 
to make progress in organisms. We exist by virtue of 
that long expenditure. For the fierce struggles amidst 
the reeds of those old marsh continents we are the 
stronger and wiser to-day. Not only have our human 
sires fought for us the wars of political and moral liber- 
ty, but the brutes as well. An infinite tenderness and 
pity fills the heart of the true naturalist as he pores on 
their long mouldering bones. They have lived and laid 
down their lives for us. Nay, they have yielded their 
very souls to us. Their souls were spent to equip the 
human organism and are, in a sense, pent in it still, 
even as the olden sunshine is imprisoned in the coal 
measures. The capacity for mind in the body and 
brain of man exists and is bequeathed only at the ex- 
pense of the soul of ancestral life. 

It is not alone in books that the effects of intellec- 
tual life are preserved. In every nation or community 



94 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

of man there is always an ever-growing accumulation 
of those effects which descend from generation to gen- 
eration, orally^ in maxims, adages, trades, crafts, and 
traditions. The course and manner of human life is 
directed in great part by these consolidated experiences 
of intellect in the past. To secure the proof of truth 
contained in each of such maxims and to verify each 
detail of a craft, soul has been expended and thus 
passed into effect. 

The human organism must be regarded as built upon 
a definite plan which exists actually or potentially in 
the embryo, and which has been perfecting itself ever 
since the simplest organisms swam in earth's primitive 
seas. Although constantly copied and continuously 
renewed, the body of man is yet one of the oldest 
things on earth, older than the granitic mountains, older 
perhaps than the present continents. 

The organism of man is thus the resultant of a 
world-long struggle for a means of intelligent expres- 
sion by the elemental sentience. Nature labors to 
bring forth omniscience and omnipotence. The hu- 
man soul comes into existence by virtue of an organic 
process which it has been the object of the best effort 
of terrestrial life to bring to its present state of excel- 
lence : so costly and so holy a thing is the body of 
man. It is the accumulated inheritance of the ages. 

Our libraries are reservoirs of soul effects, or pre- 
served intellectual life. The graphic conservation of 
intelligence has thus become a most efficient aid to 
assist posterity. Instead of being dissipated in irre- 
claimable effects, experience is held in store. The 
effect of the soul of a Newton and a Faraday is found 
iu their recorded discoveries ; and although they no 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 95 

longer continue to live, their expended and recorded 
souls still instruct us. In books they have attained a 
personally insentient immortality ; the effect of their 
souls has been saved. 

Wealth, treasure, even money may, in a sense, be 
regarded as an amassed store of soul, an hereditament 
acquired from the expenditure of intelligence in the past. 

What becomes of the soul at death? 

To those who, jealous for creed's sake, sometimes 
criticise in the inquisitorial spirit, it is distinctly stated 
at the outset that this paper does not treat, either^?'o or 
con^ unless inferentially, of the salvation or condemna- 
tion of the " soul " of man or beast, at the hands of 
supernatural beings. Faith in the interposition of a 
pitying or avenging deity, outside of nature, is not 
here discussed. Concerning such tenets the only posi- 
tion taken is that such salvation or condemnation of a 
soul, disembodied and separated from matter, would be 
an essentially supernatural and miraculous act ; and 
that from the very nature of things such tenets must 
ever remain a matter of " faith," without evidence. The 
purpose here is to set forth, not what may be done for 
man by an agency outside nature, but what man may do 
for himself under nature. 

The entire vast literature of the soul and its fortunes 
after death founds on a definition of soul of which bio- 
logical science has no knowledge : a definition utterly 
unlike what all present knowledge of nature and of 
matter would lead us to give. 

All theories of spiritism and the " disembodied " soul 
rest, in reality, on the assumption that " force "or energy 



96 



i^LURICELLULAR MAN. 



in nature is separable from matter and may exist apart 
from it ; whereas, so far as science can determine, there 
is no such thing in nature, or in cosmos, as pure force. 
Disassociated from energy, too, matter would no longer 
be matter to the senses. We could not have knowledge 
of it ; and there is no reason to believe that the two 
components ever exist separate, or are separable. For 
this reason behef in " disembodied souls " must always 
remain a matter oi faith merely, and fall within the 
category of the supernatural. Science can never ob- 
tain knowledge of the supernatural ; and to the pres- 
ent writer it appears of the nature of a physical im- 
possibility that such hnowledge can he received through 
any of the senses or modes of perception possessed hy 
man. 

The biological answer to the question, whether the 
human soul is immortal under nature, depends wholly 
on what is meant by the word soul. And it is here 
that the minds of most persons become bewildered, and 
hence tend to disagreement. 

If by soul is meant the elemental sentience of the 
matter which forms the intellectual tissue, then the 
soul of man is immortal, — as immortal as the universe 
itself. The particles of living matter are indestructible 
and never part with their primary energy. Nothing 
either of substance or elemental sentience which goes to 
make up soul is ever destroyed by death or ceases to 
exist in cosmos. 

If by soul is meant the effect produced by the expendi- 
ture of the personal intelligence on other human beings 
and on the world at large, that effect, or work done, 
does not cease at the death of the person ; it remains a 
factor for good or ill through all time, even after the 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE SOUL? 97 

name and individuality of the dead person are forgot- 
ten by all the living. 

If by soul is meant that veritable part of the human 
living protoplasm which descends from parent to off- 
spring in the embryo, bearing ancestral traits, charac- 
teristics and the race stamp, — all those directive and 
formative tendencies which make the human embryo 
grow to be man or woman, instead of a tree, a dog, or 
an ox, — then indeed does the human soul survive in 
children and has survived throuorh the lono^ eras of evo- 
lution, since the primary racial protoplasm first came 
into being. It will live as long as the race lives. 

If by soul is meant all which the intellectual tissue 
or living matter is and contains from inheritance, in a 
word, personality, imagination, memory, ambition, the 
ego^ capable of willing effects and subject to pain and 
pleasure, hope and fear, then the certainty that it 
ceases to exist under nature at organic death is so 
complete, that belief in its disembodied survival is a 
mere fantasy. 

And this is one of those hard truths of our century 
and our sciences which display at first sight a grim and 
relentless aspect, but are necessarily disclosed to drive 
us forward to invention and achievement. 



98 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 



VI. 

IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 

Such is the present stage and estate of the evolution 
' of life on the earth, from the biological point of view ; 
such the human situation. 

Frankly, the writer would not have deemed it worth 
the while to prepare these papers if he believed there 
were no further word to be spoken. 

If I saw nothing more in evolution than humanity 
always dying and ever doomed to death, I would not 
add a further page to the iteration of its death sentence. 

There are those who think differently, however. 

Of late, within the last five years, a new school of 
philosophy has arisen among us, a school which I 
believe to be utterly defective in its conclusion, the 
more defective the more detrimental to truth, in that 
its premises nre well chosen. 

For it founds broadly and well in the monistic con- 
ception of the universe. Its working motive is melior- 
ism, or the betterment of mankind. It recognizes the 
fact, that the soul — meaning thereby, personality, 
memory, self-consciousness — cannot exist apart from 
the organism, and defines individual man as a transitory 
embodiment of the soul of humanity. 

Thence, devoid of faith, it concludes that with thirty, 
fifty, or a hundred years of life, man as an individual 
must rest content, although the effects of his life, or 
soul, survive in the life of the race ; and in his offspring, 
a germinal portion of his living substance which does 



IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 99 

not, however, transmit self-consciousness, survives and 
may survive indefinitely. Hence we are advised to 
sink our personality in the grander life of humanity ; 
to merge our self interests in those of the race- 
Death, organic and personal death, it is held, is the 
common lot and law of nature. Nowhere is there any 
hope of escape. Death is the necessary end of life ; in 
the future as in the past man will live only to die. 

Thus does a school of scientific philosophy apply, 
wrongfully apply, the present facts of biology to morals 
and religion. 

A religion it may become, but at best it would be a 
religion of despair, relieved only by periodical out- 
bursts of pessimism. The great, warm, hopeful heart 
of humanity could never accept it. A faith it can 
hardly become ; for there is not the element oi faith or 
hope in it. 

Alluding to the reluctance of the German people to 
accept this negative doctrine concerning immortality, 
frank, out-spoken Heeckel petulantly remarks, " but the 
mass of mankind want above all things their personal 
ego immortality, and everything else stands in second 
rank." 

True, wholly true, and based on a deeper-lying 
biological truth than has yet been recognized. 

Monism, meliorism, and resignation to death as the 
necessary and natural end of human personality and 
intellect! And is this, then, the outcome of the heroic 
struggle of evolution ? 

Most men, doomed to death, are brave enough to meet 
it with a certain firmness and sometimes with reckless 
gayety. None the less, such is not a normal condition 
of mind or heart. 



100 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

Philosophers who have philosophized their brains to 
a condition of world-weariness, and educated, elderly 
persons who have fortified their minds with the tenets 
of the above weary philosophers, may accept such a 
creed without very poignant regret. 

The young and normal will shrink from it with a 
shudder ; and the uneducated will never accept it, so 
long as a ritual is preached which presents a promise of 
more life. 

The error of this conclusion touching human life is 
deep in its premises. This philosophy grasps not the 
true and real principle of life and soul. It rejects 
personality and makes little of individual man. It has 
failed to comprehend the fact, that life never exists save 
as self. It confounds personality with impersonality, 
and calmly asks the personal to become impersonal, to 
blot itself out. 

Let us here iterate two principles of life, set forth in 
a preceding paper. 

The point to be particularly emphasized, the truth 
without recognition of which no correct or adequate 
conception of the human soul can be formed, is that the 
root of personality is in the cell. In the cell a certain 
circle of sentience — the elemental sentience of particles 
— is formed, the axis of which is self self-conscious- 
ness, personality. In the brain many thousand cells 
are joined by filaments of living matter in such sentient 
union that they all blend together in a personal one, or 
ego; but the root and origin of it all is in the personal 
self of the cell. 

When this fact is lost sight of, or given less than its 
full recognition, the true conception of the human intel- 
lect is vitiated and goes astray. The cell is ever what 



IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 101 

the individual citizen is to the nation, the essential liv- 
ing unit. 

From this fact, which may be ranked as the first 
principle of psychology, we pass to the second, also of 
primary significance. 

A unicellular creature, or a cell of a pluricellular 
animal, exhibits self, or personality, in proportion to 
the quality, age, health, and general well-being of the 
modicum of living matter contained therein. In other 
words, the strength of self, or personality, depends on 
the health and activity of the protoplasm of the 
cell. Self-consciousness slackens in vividness and 
power as the living matter of the cell deteriorates, 
becomes restricted by " formed matter," or starved for 
lack of food particles. Whatever agency, indeed, de- 
presses the protoplasmic activity of the cell, diminishes 
self-hood at its axiatorigin in exact proportion. This 
self-hood is the origin of individual life. Life slackens 
as the personality slackens ; and death is but the total 
cessation of self-hood. A cell lives only as it utters 
self. 

In young full normal health, its personality is strong. 
In disease and that consummation of noxious and 
restrictive agencies which we term old age, personality 
is weak, and weakens to its cessation. Self or person- 
ality always resists all agencies which tend to weaken 
or end it. 

It is as if the component, elementally sentient par- 
ticles formed a certain pyrrhic circle or sphere about 
the cell's axis, and that the subjective self or personality 
arose from it. Whatever breaks this pyrrhic union of 
the particles, breaks self, destroys personality. Self 
appears from the concatenation of life-abounding par- 



102 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

tides, as the iris shines from the lighted rain-drops, 
and ceases when sunshine and rain-drops cease to inter- 
act ; and hence certain of our modern philosophers have 
been led to regard self and personality as an incident 
merely of cell life. But this is a partial view, leading 
to grave error. The cell never really becomes a cell, 
till subjective self reacts in it, by the, as yet, little- 
demonstrated steps of will-power. Otherwise, there 
would be wo free will in the world ; and an insentient 
fatalism would prevail throughout the universe. But 
one intelligent glance down the tube of the microscope, 
at the humblest little bacterium will show that his sub- 
jective self is in reaction there on the external world ; in 
a word that he is self -controlled. A cell is a self. A 
unicellular creature is a single self, A pluricellular 
creature is an e-plurihus-unum of cell selves, so con- 
nected by living bonds of the self-same protoplasm, 
that they can express all their selves as one. None 
the less, the seat of all self-consciousness, feeling, 
pleasure, and pain is in the cell, and there inheres and 
remains, not only in unicellular creatures, but in pluri- 
cellular quite as fixedly. 

Hence it is for the cells that our solicitude should ex- 
tend. Our care must ever be for these. Self and 
subjectivity reside there and there only ; and life is 
strong only as self is vividly exhibited. 

These are biological facts, and their bearing on the 
present question is apparent. 

The philosophy which counsels resignation to death, 
the sinking of self in humanity, the merging of per- 
sonality in the life of the race, is a philosophy of self- 
obliteration, a doctrine of death. The reception of 
such ideas and their adoption into daily thought and 



IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 103 

practice, cannot be otherwise than obstructive to hu- 
man life. The passivity and apathy of certain Oriental 
peoples, are, in part, due to the long prevalence of sim- 
ilar doctrines. The progress and elan of Western 
peoples comes measurably from the prominent exhibition 
of self and the culture oi personality in individual men. 

Remarkable men the world over have always dis- 
played strong self and even aggressive personality. 
Self (not a futile " selfishness ") is to be cultivated 
in every human being ; and humanity will never be 
strong till it is composed of personally strong men and 
women, not resigned to die and sink their souls in an 
abstraction, but determined to live and secure for them- 
selves omnipotence and immortality. 

For what is humanity, this humanity in which we are 
advised to sink our personality and merge our souls ? 
This humanity which " wants above all things its per- 
sonal ego immortality, and holds all else in second 
rank '' ? What is it but a million or a billion of per- 
sonalities? Will any one be so obtuse as to define 
humanity as the ova, or germs, by means of which one 
personality now makes shift to bring another into exist- 
ence ? Will any one hold that we ought in moral obliga- 
tion to stop living, in order that these little make-shifts 
of life may continue to come into existence j9e?' se? Is 
not the race-life a herd of individual lives ? Does it 
suffer or take pleasure otherwise than in these individ- 
ual lives? 

It is the welfare of the individual which is to be 
considered, not humanity or the race ; for humanity, 
otherwise than as individuals, is an abstraction. When 
we speak of working for the race and of self-sacrifice 
for humanity's sake, we mean for the sake of a certain 



104 PLURIOELLULAR MAN. 

number of individuals. Heredity, inherited excellences, 
transmitted traits, are of no yalue till they appear 
in individuals. It is not the germ plasm of mankind 
that constitutes the raison d'etre of life, but the adult 
man and woman. It should be our care to save per- 
sons, not germs. Germs are of consequence only be- 
cause adults cannot yet be preserved. 

The school of scientific philosophy that accepts death 
as a finality of personal life neither grasps the real 
significance of evolution, nor has any true conception 
of the promise in terrestrial life. Even the best of our 
scientific men seem to experience great difficulty in 
shaking off the idea that human beings must always die 
because, forsooth, they have died thus far. But the 
dream of all the ages of mankind is immortal life, not 
for the race, but for the individual. The existent faith 
in disembodied soul life after bodily death is but the 
mirage of souls thirsty for deathless life ; a fantasy, but 
a glorious one — one in keeping with the spirit and 
genius of humanity and one that will never be given up 
till science has something better to offer men than the 
certainty of personal death. 

But it has something better. A new conception of 
the mission of science is entering the minds of men. 
We shall not always die. Personality with its treas- 
ures of experience, memory, soul, will not always be 
lost after a few years of inexperience and unsuccessful 
struggle to live. 

The defect, the condemning defect, of this late 
school of philosophers, is their failure to grasp the real 
significance of the evolution of human life. Death 
forms a part of their scheme. They see in evolution 
only the nether segment of evolution ; its grand arc 



IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 105 

which spans the heavens, its promise of deathlessness 
to living beings, is still unseen. They bring from their 
biological studies no tidings to men but the certainty 
of personal death, and ask them to find their immortal- 
ity in the germ plasm. Their creed is a half truth, 
the dark half. Such a half truth is as futile as error, 
and may be even more pernicious. 

Monism, meliorism, and a cultivated resignation to 
death as the best event that can occur, after a life spent 
in acquiring experience, learning, and all the data suit- 
able and necessary to live ! 

Monism — a primary truth of nature. 

Meliorism — a pleasant and correct doctrine. 

Resignation to personal death — a fallacious deduc- 
tion, a stultification of nature and life. 

Life and death are intrinsically antagonistic. Resig- 
nation to personal death there should never be in the 
sense of acquiescence from principle. When death is 
seen to be unavoidable by any exercise of our powers 
to escape, it is befitting that a decent calmness and forti- 
tude should be summoned to meet it. But never resig- 
nation. Day or night we should cease not to lament 
that we must still die on account of the imperfection of 
our resources and the crude state of our sciences. 

Man has developed to live, not to die ; and that is a 
vain philosophy that builds on death, and a false reli- 
gion that raises a shrine to it. 

Life, longer life, and still more life should be the hope 
and the faith of humanity. 

Our sciences will bring prolonged life. There is in 
man, moreover, a tissue, the intellectual tissue, which 
is still progressive in the sense of evolving a new type ; 
a tissue which will develop deathless life. Die, we of 



106 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

the present century may and probably shall. We are 
still too ignorant to attain prolonged life. But there 
should be no mistake in our mental attitude regarding 
death. It is ever an untimely fate, the penalty of still 
imperfect powers and an evil to be retrieved with all 
our powers ; and even this radical change in our mental 
attitude touching death, will effect much to intensify 
and prolong life. In fact, it is the first step toward 
more life. 

One of the most noxious of popular doctrines is that 
which portrays the human race as having already reached 
the acme of possible earthly life — as being the best 
that can be done on the earth in the line of vital evolu- 
tion. Whereas all the probabilities are that mankind 
is one of the incipient developments of that evolution. 
Human beings die on account of the still unreclaimed, 
unsubjugated conditions of the earth's surface as a Aa6- 
itat — not that death is a necessary sequence to life. 

The plain truth of the matter appears to be that we 
do not personally survive death because we are not yet 
fit to survive. We are not yet worthy of the immortal 
life, or the prolonged life which we crave. We are 
still too imperfect for it, intellectually as well as or- 
ganically. Judged by nature's standard our souls are 
not yet worth preservation. It is quite as certain, too, 
that we shall live longer — even become practically 
immortal — as soon as by earnest research, self effort 
and endeavor to improve ourselves and our conditions, 
we have become worthy of it. The universe with all 
its unlimited opportunities and treasures is before us — 
to conquer, to possess, to enjoy. Nature neither 
frowns untowardly, nor yet gratuitously assists us, but 
yields to our labors with a certain grand, calm pas- 



IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 107 

sivity, and seems never to grudge us our well-earned 
conquests. It is ours to take and hold. Otherwise, 
Nature is not providential. The wall falls and crushes 
us, if we do not take care. The fire which we have kin- 
dled consumes us, if we do not guard it. There is no 
favoritism. With a wide but impartial smile, the great 
unconscious objective would seem to say, — Go on if 
you desire. I neither let, nor hinder. 

To deify nature and look for " providential " care 
from her, is to do nature an injustice. The vast do- 
main of inorganic matter about us is but elementally 
sentient, neither beneficent, nor malevolent. It is a 
free and an open field in which we must stand or fall 
for ourselves. 

These, indeed, may not be tidings with which to 
flatter and allure the multitude. At such a disadvan- 
tage stands scientific^ truth against ecclesiasticism and 
its gilded promissory. Yet there are many who see in 
this aspect of nature and this wide free field for self- 
development the earnest of loftier ideals, purer morals, 
and a grander day for man. 

Is it possible to save the soul ? 

There have been a great many theories of soul salva- 
tion. Every religious system treats of the problem — 
usually by the summoning in of supernatural powers 
and agencies, with rite and ritual. The point of chief 
interest in all these promulgated systems of salvation, 
the really significant point, is the evidence aff*orded of 
the very strong hope and desire of humanity every- 
where for prolonged life and immortality. With all 
their vagaries the systems are so many evidences of 
the strong desire of human beings for prolonged life. 

Of how great avail these systems (embodying as they 



108 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

always do the slowly developing ethics of the race) 
have been for the encouragement and comfort of man- 
kind through the darker, semi-brutal eras of race life, 
it would be difficult to make a correct estimate ; such 
aid, indeed, can scarcely be over-estimated. And 
although in the stronger, clearer light of later science, 
the tenets of all olden creeds touching disembodied 
soul life are seen to be invalidated, the hope of death- 
less life which found expression in them has been 
fostered and transmitted from generation to genera- 
tion. 

Never stronger has been that desire and that hope of 
immortality than to-day when the race, or at least the 
civilized and educated branch of it, emerging from its 
childhood into adolescence, casts myth and ditty away 
and perceives the tale of disembodied souls to be a 
fable of its infancy, a sootTiing tale to pacify its early 
woes. 

In this century we recognize for the first time our 
real position as inhabitants of a globe in space. For 
the first time the grandeur and the awe of our situation 
presents itself as fact and truth, stripped of fable and 
myth. The mighty opportunities, which the conquest 
and control of the cosmic forces ofier, begin to be per- 
ceived. Power, unlimited power lies idly pulsating in 
semi-sentient macro-volts. Man has but to subjugate 
and direct it, to be the architect of worlds, even, to 
restore aged globes, to replenish the vast fires of failing 
suns. There is neither let nor hindrance in cosmos. 
No jealous deity tyrannizes ; no malignant fiend thwarts. 
We are alone. Alone on the grand illimitable. Soli- 
tary, but free. It is not very probable that the earth's 
companion globes of this solar system are the habitat 



IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 109 

of intelligent life. What lives on or around other outer 
suns, we know not ; but within a radius of forty tril- 
lions of miles, we are beyond much doubt alone. But 
children no longer, we see ourselves alone and are not 
afraid. It is a glorious heritage of freedom. We have 
but to discover, invent, and rule all this cosmic pleni- 
tude of empire. To address prayers to the wide, little- 
conscious terraine and sit passive to see them answered 
in our behalf is idle. The truer conception of univer- 
sal beneficence makes us sure, too, that such shelter 
would not be best. We are the unaided free. If we 
want prolonged life, we must make shift to achieve it. 
We shall die till we do achieve it ; and were we to die 
resignedly — as our philosophers would advise us — 
resignedly forever, nature would still smile in eternal 
calm. Our fate and fortunes import not to it. On the 
other hand, we are under no obligation to it. It is 
ours to win, to hold, and to use. 

The one element lacking to realize all this wealth of 
freedom is time. There is not time. Before we have 
fairly learned the rudiments of life, we suffer from dis- 
ease and infirmity, and alas, must die, miserably die, 
with all this infinite opportunity to live unentered, un- 
enjoyed, unpossessed. Death keeps humanity down to 
a bootless learning and re-learning, over and over, of 
the mere alphabet and accidence of life. On account 
of death the human generations scarcely more than hold 
their own ; for in dying the results of teaching are al- 
most wholly lost ; the succeeding generation scarcely 
more than learns what its parents have learned. Little 
indeed of experience is really conserved ; for the tissue 
of intellect must mature for forty years to become really 
wise. Death causes all this vast labor to be done over 



110 PLURIOELLULAR MAK. 

and over again, perhaps, on the whole, better, often 
worse. Reproduction is better than extinction, but 
only a degree better, and not for a moment to be com- 
pared with the grand advantages of living on free from 
personal death. 

Reproduction takes place because we should other- 
wise die, but it is not an ideal mode of survival. The 
individual with his acquired experience and refinement 
is the ideal survivor. Infancy suffers what would be 
needless tortures in learning to live, if the adult could 
survive in health, with living matter fresh, growing, and 
unshrunken. 

The world-wide demand of educated, inventive man 
is now for more time. He sees the doctrine of dis- 
embodied souls to be a myth, and asks : Is it possible 
to save the soul? Salvation, in the old sacerdotal sense, 
is the portrayal of an aspiration only ; but can we not 
achieve prolonged life ? The question is one that enters 
with the newer conception of our freedom in the uni- 
verse. What we have we must achieve for ourselves. 
We are alone here with everything to gain from inven- 
tion, research, and discovery. 

Immortality is the birthright of life and the destiny 
of man. Men still die, but death is not an irremediable 
evil. The great scheme of evolution of life, when 
grasped in its entirety, points to a purified earth, in- 
habited by one great nationality, the decendants of man- 
kind, whose lives will be prolonged toward immortality. 
A gens terrestrial and celestial, not over peopling the 
earth, nor yet devoid of procreative power; not an as- 
semblage of infirm, aged organisms, kept alive hy im- 
proved medicaments ; but persons fresh in unfading 



IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? Ill 

youth to whom aging will bring not infirmity, but 
stronger personality, fuller life, grander beauty, and 
greater wisdom. 



The facts and the rationale of the preceding papers, 
and of the inquiry as herein formulated, may be briefly 
restated : — 

In protoplasm, or the physico-vital state of matter, 
in which alone terrestrial life exists, and from which 
the evolution of life has taken place, there appears to 
be the demonstrationof a great truth of nature, namely, 
that motion emanates outward from a sentient subjective 
impulse deep at the heart, the core, of matter ; that all 
natural phenomena have a subjective source, primarily, 
albeit there are many intermediate correlations of that 
subjective impulse from out concentric estates of material 
tenuity, ere what we first perceive as subjective takes 
on the aspect of objective. 

In a word, matter is not primarily dead^ but sub- 
jective and sentient ; and our proposition concerning it 
makes to the efiect that a lowly, primitive sentience 
antedates movement, and is the primary cause of 
motion ; and that in protoplasm, this sentience assumes 
the guidance of chemism and mechanical motion. 
Sentience is the subjective side, or component, of uni- 
versal matter ; and matter when aggregated and com- 
bined in the protoplasmic state becomes living, that 
is to say, self-actuating matter, by virtue of its sentient 
property. 

Such at least appears to be the more rational hypoth- 
esis of life, to wit, that it is correlated and identical 
with that power or energy in nature of which we do 



112 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

know something, rather than that it is a sporadic mani- 
festation of a new and supposititious power of which 
we know nothing. For ultimately the question brings 
us to this alternative. 

Theoretically, matter, meaning ultimate matter, 
might be defined as that remote, inner centre, or focus 
of existence, whence our twin perceptions of energy 
and of inertia emerge. It is now probable that there 
is no such thing as inert or lifeless matter; nor yet 
any such condition of energy as pure force existing 
apart from matter. Were we bold enough to attempt 
a definition of matter in a single word, that word would 
be Emanance^ 

And why not Deity ? 

Because, it seems to me, that every right-minded 
person must shrink from ascribing the ''wide, sad 
tragedy" of life, as enacted and suffered in its past and 
even in its present course of evolution on the earth, to 
the providence of an omnipotent, merciful, and all-wise 
creator, believing such a conception to be immoral. 
For it is only a purblind optimism that can see mercy, 
wisdoms or justice throughout the long eras of injustice, 
cruelty, and bloodshed of which earth has been the 
theatre ever since life first stirred upon its surface. 
We would ascribe the responsibility for it to no Being 
who was able to prevent or alleviate it, but believe 
rather that deity is an ideal of the human intellect, and 
that it will be attained as a result of evolution on the 
earth, in the apotheosis of man. 

In protoplasm the living substance has slowly /eZi^ its 
way, so as to speak, upward by organic steps, from 
simple sentience to organized intelligence. Sentience, 
expressing itself in terms of life, has persisted, as if 



ii 



IS IT POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SOUL? 113 

from some inherent stress or impulse, to obtain, through 
organism, better and fuller development. That stress, 
that impulse, comes from the nascent perception of joy- 
when sentience first stirs matter, in protoplasm. The 
lowliest polyp will make a grand struggle to save its 
life. Nature thus makes oath in every creature that 

5 life is indeed a boon and worth the living. In man- 
kind the desire for extended life has grown into an aspi- 
ration for immortal life ; and in all the great religious 
systems this aspiration has been projected forward as 
creed in the immortality of the soul. Immortal life in 
"heaven " has been "promised" as the incentive to and 
the reward for correct living. Immortal life, or, strictly 
speaking, more life, has been the ideal of the human 
era. " Salvation " from death and misery has been the 
dream of our race since very early times : the one 
bright hope never quite despaired of. But, like all the 
great instinctive aspirations of mankind, this one, in 
religious systems, has been adapted to man's condition 
of helplessness and weakness. The aspiration has been 
given a form of certainty to make it more effective. 

At length, after centuries of dogma, erratic faith, 
and equally erratic doubt, we are in possession of facts 

■< from which a creed may be rationally forecast. Those 
facts demonstrate the continuous evolution of life under 
nature from lowliest forms to man : a long, weary, and 
unaided struggle upward through organization from the 
elemental sentience of matter to the human intellect. 
But is all this grand effort to terminate in the semi- 
brutal, half-developed creature, man, with all his ideals 
unrealized? Has evolution ceased? On the contrary, 
it is the writer's faith that we have as yet seen but the 
nether limb of evolution. Its grand complement has 



114 PLURICELLULAR MAN. 

still to be disclosed in the perfecting of the human 
organism and the removal of the causes of disease, old- 
aging and death ; in a word, the achievement of immor- 
tality. Immortal life will be won by applied knowledge. 
Man will save his own soul. Earth is to be made 
"heaven." "Salvation" is to come from knowledge 
and the apotheosis of the race. This is what evolution 
means. This is what life on the earth is struggling 
upward to win : Immortality, Happiness, Heaven ; 
ideals to be realized by human effort. The tenets of 
all the great religious systems foreshadow it. It is 
time to understand this. It is time to realize our true 
situation on the earth, and cease from chasing mirage. 
We have now sufficient knowledge to begin to save our 
own souls. As well face the facts of our mortal con- 
dition to-day as spend another thousand years doting 
on fond illusions. If we would live, we must save our- 
selves. This is the religion of life ; the religion of self- 
salvation. It is not " atheism " ; not " materialism," in 
the old crass sense. Not " infidelity " ; rather Fidelity 
to the best and the essential doctrines of all religions. 
Not " scepticism," but Hope and Faith in Life. Not the 
"idle, new dream " of" Scientific Materialism," but the 
Dream of all the Ages ; the grand scheme of Nature, 
maturing and going into effect since first our earth 
became the theatre of life. 



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